
Qass. 
Book. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



COMMENCEMENT 
DAYS 



:Tt^>^o 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

A BOOK FOR GRADUATES 

BY 
WASHINGTON GLADDEN ^ 

AUTHOR OF " LIVE AND LEARN," ETC. 



N?m fnrk 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1916 

All rights reserved 



UlSp-sal 



Copyright, 1916 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1916. 



4r^ 

m -6 1915 

i)a,A427550 ^ 
>tc "7--, 



PREFACE 

I COUNT myself in few things happier than 
in my remembrance of the friendship of two 
generations of college and university gradu- 
ates. This book is a souvenir of those pleasant 
associations. It contains what I have found it 
in my heart to say in various Commencement 
Addresses and Baccalaureate Sermons. No one 
could get the consent of his own conscience to 
bring anything other than his best thought to 
such an occasion; and as these words have ex- 
pressed to many graduating classes my deepest 
concern and my heartiest good wishes for their 
welfare, so I hope that many of those who shall 
come after them may find upon these pages the 
sober counsels of one who has never found it need- 
ful to talk down to young people, nor expedient 
to flatter them, but who has learned to believe 
that the call to the highest things is the call to 
which they are most ready to respond. 

Washington Gladden. 

Columbus, January 15, 1916. 



COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

PAGE 

I. The School of Work 3 

II. Castles in the Air 41 

III. What is Worth While.^ 67 

IV. Some Things I have Learned 87 

V. Short Cuts loi 

VI. Study and Growth 125 

VII. Books and Reading 143 

VIII. What For.? 165 

IX. Good Work for Graduates 185 

X. Leaders or Followers.'* 207 

XL Form and Substance 227 



I 

THE SCHOOL OF WORK 



Commencement Days 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 

THESE bountiful days of June have many 
delights and invitations for us; the roses 
are blowing and the wedding bells are 
chiming, and orioles and bobolinks are pouring 
out their souls in song; and amid all these 
pleasant scenes and sounds the scholars are 
gathering on the campus and in the chapel, to 
receive the meed of faithful work, to speak the 
parting word, and to linger, for a moment, in 
associations that have become dear, before they 
go out to meet the shadowy future. To some of 
us these days are memorable; our thoughts go 
back to other Junes in another century, when 
the bands and the banners and the marshals with 
their batons, and the old graduates with their 
mouldy jokes, and the mothers and the sisters and 
the cousins and the aunts beaming with apprecia- 
tion and expectation, made up a mise en scene full 
of dramatic possibilities. I wonder if commence- 
3 



4 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

ment means as much to these young fellows as it 
meant to some of us old fellows, fifty years ago. 
It is hard for me to believe it. "The world is so 
full of a number of things" that were not within 
our ken in the middle of the last century, that it 
seems as if nothing could really mean quite as 
much to anybody as everything did in that slow 
old time. Yet I make no doubt there is more 
than one in this presence whose heart is heavy 
with the sense of what is ending here to-day; with 
the consciousness that something has been hap- 
pening in the last four years that never can happen 
again; with a wistful and apprehensive premoni- 
tion of what is behind the veil. 

Yes, I am sure that these young men and 
women are consciously confronting here to-day 
much the same question that we older ones faced 
in the Junes to which we are looking back. The 
costume of the festival is diiferent; the realities 
of life are not radically altered. There are some 
of us who have more to remember than you, but 
you have more to hope for than we; and in this 
hour when yesterday and to-morrow have met 
together, when memory and hope have kissed each 
other, I would fain believe that all of us, old and 
young, are ready for a little serious thought upon 
the meaning of life. 

Most of us have lived long enough to know 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 5 

that the end of a college course Is not the goal of 
intellectual attainment; commencement is the 
right word; those who honorably reach it are 
fairly over the threshold of their education; they 
have done well if they are now ready to begin to 
learn what life has to teach. A course in the 
University has served its purpose if it has laid 
some good foundations on which future accumu- 
lations of experience may rest; if it has given 
some training in habits of investigation; if it has 
developed some power of appreciating the best 
in life and art; if it has laid down the lines on which 
study may be usefully continued; if it has lifted 
up and clarified some worthy ideals of conduct 
and service. I hope that your four years in the 
University has done as much as this for most of 
you. If it has, the expenditure has been abund- 
antly justified. 

We frequently hear from those who have been 
popularly deemed the most successful men of 
this generation, the judgment that a college edu- 
cation is of little or no value; that it rather unfits 
a man for such enterprises as those by which they 
have risen to eminence. This is interesting testi- 
mony, and I trust that it Is true. If our colleges 
did equip men for such enterprises, that would be 
the strongest possible reason for never going to 
college. If your university training has not made 



6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

you incapable of entertaining the plutocratic pur- 
pose, or of rendering the plutocrat willing and 
efficient service in the realization of his purpose, 
it has not done much for you. 

It is to be hoped, however, that it has fitted you 
I to take up some honorable and worthy calling, 
some calling which will seem to you to be "af- 
fected," as the lawyers say, "with a public in- 
terest"; some calling in which you can feel your- 
self to be identified with the common welfare. 
Now, manifestly, there are some callings which 
no fair-minded man can so regard. There are 
some callings the aggregate result of which must 
be public injury; they are evil and only evil, and 
that continually. There are others which may 
result in some incidental benefits; by means of 
them we might do some good but the harm would 
outweigh the good; the more we prospered in 
them the larger would be the social damage. 
Such callings might be profitable financially, for, 
strange to say, there are millions of human beings 
who are ready to offer larger rewards to those 
who do them injury than to those who do them 
good; but no one on whom a college education 
has not been wasted, will select a calling the net 
result of which is social injury, no matter how 
large the prospective profits may be. 

Some calling, then, which links itself with the 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 7 

well-being of our neighbors and our fellow men, the 
diligent prosecution of which will not only secure 
for ourselves an honorable livelihood, but will 
add, in some appreciable degree, to the sum of 
human happiness — this, let us trust. Is now or 
soon will be, within the choice of every member 
of this graduating class. Let me say also that 
this calling ought to be, in every case, a congenial 
calling. I know well that in some cases it cannot 
and will not be; stern necessity and relentless 
circumstance often drive us into occupations that 
are not thoroughly congenial and keep us in them; 
but so far as we have the power of choice we 
ought to choose the work we like best — not that 
which brings us the largest pecuniary recompense, 
not that which promises most speedily to enrich 
us, but that which is most interesting to us, that 
which most completely enlists all our powers of 
body and mind. What is before all things essen- 
tial is that we shall be interested in our work; that 
we shall believe it to be worth doing; that we shall 
be able to put love and enthusiasm into it. And 
even though, by force of circumstances, we may be 
constrained to engage in work which does not at 
first strongly appeal to us, it is best to make a 
virtue of necessity and adapt ourselves, as best 
we can, to our callings. In any work that is 
worth doing we may surely find much that awak- 



8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

ens thought and elicits enthusiasm; in industry, as 
in appetite, there are acquired tastes, and we may 
learn to take a genuine interest in work which at 
the beginning was unattractive. 

The point on which I now desire to lay em- 
phasis is this, that the discipline by which a man 
comes to himself and completes his manhood is 
mainly that which is won in the pursuit of the 
calling by which he gains his livelihood. "The 
great majority of men," says a late strong writer, 
"gather an edifying understanding of men and 
things just in so far as they actually and resolutely 
stick to the performance of some special, and (for 
the most part) congenial task. Their education in 
life must be grounded in the persistent attempt 
to realize in action some kind of purpose — a pur- 
pose usually connected with the occupation 
whereby they live. In the pursuit of that purpose 
they will continually be making experiments — 
opening up new lines of work, establishing new 
relations with other men, and taking more or less 
serious risks. Each of these experiments offers 
them an opportunity both for personal discipline 
and for increasing personal insight." * 

Your education, then, the best part of it, will be 
gained in your work. The best educated men are 
educated not for their work but by their work. 
* " The Promise of American Life," by Herbert Croly, p. 404. 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 9 

You may, Indeed, have Intellectual interests 
outside of your dally business; it Is well to have 
these; life is often greatly enriched by liberal 
studies pursued In leisure hours; but, after all, 
the best part of your education will be that which 
you win In the prosecution of your dally task. 
This means, of course, that your prevailing In- 
terest in your work shall be in the work itself, 
rather than the money that you are making out of 
it. There Is real educational value in doing any 
kind of good work well; there is no educational 
value whatever In cultivating and gratifying the 
appetite for gain. Just to the extent to which the 
craving for more becomes the motive power of a 
man's life Is the educational process retarded, just 
so far does the man himself become dwarfed and 
deformed. 

What you wish to do is to make the most of 
yourself; to complete your individuality; to be- 
come the man or woman that God meant you 
to be. This means for the community great 
variety of capacity and attainment. It is by 
these manifold diversities of power that society 
is enriched. *'A genuine Individual," says the 
author I just quoted, "must at least possess some 
special quality which distinguishes him from 
other people, which unifies the successive phases 
and the various aspects of his own life and which 



10 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

results in personal moral freedom." The man 
whose ruling interest is in his work is apt to be- 
come in this sense a genuine individual; but when 
the acquisitive motive becomes dominant, there 
is no chance for the development of any interest- 
ing personality. The man is going after the same 
thing that the rest of the crowd are pursuing; 
they are all shaped by the same forces; they are 
not likely to attain unto "any edifying personal 
independence or any peculiar personal distinc- 
tion." "Different as American business men 
are from one another in temperament, circum- 
stances and habits," says our author again, "they 
have a way of becoming fundamentally very 
much alike. Their individualities are forced into 
a common mold, because the ultimate measure 
of the value of their work is the same, and is 
nothing but its results in cash." * 

Consequently it is true that even in a society 
as active and strenuous as ours there is a vast 
amount of monotony. The commercial motive 
is suffered to be the dominant motive, and so far 
as this is true, the characters produced tend to 
one type. The ruling ideas are the same and 
there is a dreary sameness in the opinions enter- 
tained and the views of life expressed. Mammon 
is a potentate who does not encourage diversities 
* "The Promise of American Life, " by Herbert Croly, p. 410. 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK ii 

of gifts; no theories that disturb the standing 
order or the vested interests are permitted in his 
domain; of all new notions his devotees are apt 
to be intolerant. This explains the prevalence 
of fads and fashions In circles where the commer- 
cial motive Is dominant; the last place in the world 
where you would look for any kind of originality 
would be In the ranks of the four hundred. Where 
"wealth accumulates" until it becames the para- 
mount and absorbing Interest of life, "men de- 
cay," or dwindle Into units of economic force: 

"The individual withers, and the world is more and 
more." 

If, then, what the commonwealth wants of 
each of us is a full-rounded and complete per- 
sonality, It will never do for us to permit our- 
selves to fall under the spell of the prevailing 
Mammonism, for that inevitably reduces the 
dimensions of the man. It is in the work itself, 
and in the contribution which It makes to the 
common weal, that we shall find the enlargement 
and invlgoratlon of our manhood. "For," as 
our author admonishes us, "the truth Is that 
individuality cannot be dissociated 'from the 
pursuit of a disinterested object. It is a moral 
and intellectual quality and It must be realized 
by moral and intellectual means." The man 



12 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

comes to himself only when he is forgetting him- 
self in devotion to some good outside of and 
beyond himself. 

Let us assume therefore that each one of the 
young men and women before me will have found 
before many months, some calling which connects 
itself closely with the public welfare, and will be 
pursuing that calling, not primarily as a means 
of personal aggrandizement, but as a work which 
on its own account is worth doing, because it 
tends to increase the sum of human happiness. 
I wish to consider with you how such a calling, 
pursued in such a spirit, becomes a continuous 
and fruitful educational opportunity. Some of 
you may have been lamenting that your educa- 
tion must now be regarded as finished. I want 
you to see that although you may not look for- 
ward to postgraduate studies within academic 
walls, by far the best part of your education is 
still to come. 

Let us suppose, for example, that your vocation 
is to be the most ancient and honorable of all — 
the work assigned to unfallen man in the Garden 
of Eden — is there not in this work a great educa- 
tional opportunity.? I may fairly assume that 
those among you who are to be farmers have been 
studying agriculture here in the University, and 
that you have got some inkling of the need of 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK I^ 

mixing brains with husbandry. You surely do 
not need to be told of the manifold problems that 
wait for solution, in the reclamation of waste 
lands, in the improvem.ent of the soil and its 
products, in the reforestation of the hills, in 
*' making the wilderness to bring forth and bud 
that it may give seed to the sower and bread to 
the eater," in socializing the countryside, that 
the people dwelling there shall find the stimula- 
tion and the solace of good companionship, and 
the opportunities of a rewarding culture. If 
these aspects of your work as farmers loom large 
before your thought, if it is by these that your 
enthusiasms are aroused, and your energies are 
directed, I am sure that you are in a fair way 
to become highly educated men. And this, I 
assume, is what you want to be. The main thing 
that you want to get out of this calling of yours 
for yourself is a large, fruitful, noble manhood. 
You expect, and you have a right to expect, that 
you will get a comfortable living out of your work; 
that you will have enough to eat and to wear; 
that you will have an attractive and beautiful 
home; and there is not much reason to fear that 
the man who puts brains and enthusiasm into 
the business of farming will not get as much as 
that out of it, and something more. But this 
something more is not your first concern. Your 



14 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

main question is not how large gains you can 
make but how you can most fully and worthily 
express and realize your life in this calling you 
have chosen. 

You have a neighbor, perhaps, who went into 
this business for the money there was in it, and 
who has come to the end of his working life with 
a big balance in the bank, with a safe, full of 
productive securities, with three or four auto- 
mobiles, and all the outward signs of abundance. 
But how has he done it? He has skinned one or 
two thousand acres of good land leaving it per- 
ceptibly poorer than when It came under his 
hand; he has neglected all opportunities of self- 
Improvement; he has pushed his Interests with 
no regard to the welfare of his neighbor; he has 
sown broadcast, as every selfish man always does, 
the seeds of dissension and suspicion and 111 will. 
Of course, in the process his own personality has 
steadily withered and dwindled. Most men, look- 
ing at the balance In the bank and the con- 
tents of the safe call him a successful farmer; do 
you.? If all men were such as he, society would 
cease to exist, and the earth would be unin- 
habitable. 

He furnishes you, nevertheless, an excellent 
object lesson of the kind of man you do not want 
to be. I trust that the sight of him may Inspire 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 1 5 

you with the ambition to live In such a way that 
when your working days are over some one who 
knows you well may be able to say of you: "He 
is not a plutocrat; he is not leaving to his children 
any great accumulation of stocks and bonds by 
means of which they will be able to live in idle- 
ness on the labor of future generations. But 
look at his farm; see the fertile meadows where 
once were swamps; see the new forest clothing 
the once barren hillside; see the growing crops 
and fine farm buildings; see the splendid herds 
and flocks that enrich the pastures; look at the 
records that tell of the fruits and grains he has 
developed, of the pests he has stamped out; his 
own farm will sustain four times as much life 
to-day as when he began to till it, and every farmer 
in the land is his debtor. And see what he has 
made of himself. He is the brightest man in the 
county; these studies and experiments of his have 
been quickening his intellect and leading his 
mind out into many fruitful fields of knowledge 
and culture, and all these gains he has been free 
to share with all his neighbors; if you want to 
know what kind of a man he is, ask them. He is 
the heart and soul of all neighborhood life; he has 
done more than any other man to promote good 
will and friendship in the countryside and to 
make it a pleasant place for men and women and 



l6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

boys and girls to live." If something like that 
can be said about you when the end comes, then 
it will be clear that the foundations laid here in 
the University have been well built upon; that 
to-day's commencement was the bright beginning 
of a glorious career; that you have made yourself 
an example of a thoroughly educated man. 

It would be easy to show how the same law 
holds in every other lawful calling. When the 
relation of the calling to the common good is 
recognized and emphasized, and when the calling 
is heartily pursued with that end in view — to 
make it as efficient as It can be made in the service 
of the commonwealth — the individuality de- 
veloped must be high and strong and fine. 

In some callings the fact that the man gets 
his best development in and by means of his 
work is so plain that it hardly needs to be stated. 
In the case of a teacher or of a minister of the 
Gospel, for instance, the purpose of doing one's 
work well, and the purpose of making the most 
of one's self can hardly be separated in thought. 
For myself I know that I have gained all the 
power I possess in the earnest endeavor to do my 
work well; to understand and meet the intellec- 
tual and spiritual and social needs of my fellow 
men. The college and the divinity school can 
help a little in laying foundations, but most of 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 17 

what any competent minister knows he gets in 
living contact with human beings, in helping men 
and women to be friends with God and friends 
with one another, in trying to bring heaven to 
earth. Any man who will give himself to that 
work patiently and diligently will have some fair 
chance to be a pretty well educated man. 

Not less true is it that the physician's occupa- 
tion links him with the common weal. His busi- 
ness in life is to do good; that is kept steadily 
before his mind. Through his work not only is 
his intellect invigorated but his sympathies and 
affections are given abundant exercise. For this 
reason the educational opportunity which his 
work affords him is of the finest and highest sort. 

What shall we say of the work of the lawyer? 
I fear that we cannot say so much. The popular 
conception of the lawyer's function is altogether 
different from the popular conception of the 
physician's function. The suggestion that the 
doctor's business in life is to do good would be 
commonplace. The suggestion that the lawyer's 
business in life is to do good would be received 
with merriment by the unthinking crowd. It 
must be admitted that the modern practice of 
law does not always keep the ethical and social 
aspects of the lawyer's calling in high relief. The 
common conception is, no doubt, that the prac- 



1 8 COMMENCEMEN T DA YS 

tice of law is essentially warfare, to which the 
maxim, "Everything is fair in war," may be 
legitimately applied. The lawyer, in the estima- 
tion of the populace, is a kind of mercenary gladia- 
tor, who is ready, for a fee, to help those who 
seek injustice or wrong; whose skill is often em- 
ployed in showing transgressors how they may 
evade the law or escape its just penalty. It must 
be confessed that there are a good many lawyers 
in this country whose estimation of the nature 
of their calling, as their conduct shows, is not 
different from that of the populace. Some of 
them occupy conspicuous positions and have 
made great fortunes by the services which they 
have rendered to combinations of predatory 
wealth. The enormous creations of fictitious 
capital which are crushing the life out of the in- 
dustries of the land, and which are liable to result 
one of these days in a national tragedy the like 
of which history has never witnessed, are largely 
the work of astute lawyers. The nation has had 
no worse enemies than the lawyers who have 
worked out the manifold schemes by which the 
strong are enabled to prey upon the weak. 

When the lawyer's calling is so conceived and 
so followed, we can hardly think of it as affording 
an educational opportunity. Lawyers of this 
class are not educated by their work, they are 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 19 

de-educated; they may acquire a kind of wolfish 
cunning, but their better nature is dwarfed and 
crippled by such unsocial and traitorous prac- 
tices. They are adroit men, resourceful men, 
masterful men, but we could not call them great 
men. 

But there have been lawyers — there are lawyers 
— who do not so conceive their calling, and who 
could no more get their own consent to help men 
practice injustice than they could persuade them- 
selves to poison their neighbor's well or set his 
house on fire. 

Mr. Winston Churchill, in one of his stories, 
invents for us a lawyer who had made a large 
reputation by legitimate practice in St. Louis, and 
who, when he was called to New York to be 
chief adviser of one of the great trusts, quietly 
but positively declined a position ofi'ering him a 
salary of one hundred thousand dollars, on the 
ground that "a lawyer who hired himself out to 
enable one man to take advantage of another, 
prostituted his talents." There are such men, 
outside of story books. Abraham Lincoln was 
such a lawyer, as all the traditions agree. It was 
because he was such a lawyer that he rose to the 
mental and moral stature which made him the 
greatest American. He got his education, and 
it was a splendid education, in his work. There 



20 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

in that country law practice, in living contact 
with all sorts and conditions of men, holding 
steadily before his mind the great ideals of jus- 
tice, integrity, freedom and good will to men, 
he developed an intellect and built up a character 
which qualified him to be, in the great crisis of 
our national life, the leader of the nation. The 
practice of the law, as Lincoln practiced it, af- 
fords a great opportunity for the development of 
the highest manhood. There is no better field 
for the exercise of the highest qualities of human 
nature than that which is open to a lawyer who 
regards his calling as a social function, and aims 
to make his daily work tributary to the common 
good. Such a lawyer will never advise a client 
to prosecute or defend an unjust claim; in all 
civil cases he will make sure that the cause which 
he espouses is the cause of righteousness. He 
is an officer of the law, and to the law, not to his 
client, his supreme allegiance is due. There are 
many things that he can do for honest clients, 
to protect them in their rights, to see that they 
get justice, to interpret and apply the laws which 
regulate their conduct, and in all this he is teach- 
ing respect for the law, which is the safeguard of 
freedom, and helping to make life and property 
secure. Beyond this it is his business, as an 
officer of the law, to study its workings, to note 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 21 

its defects, to find out how it can be made more 
simple and more equitable; how to prevent its 
being used as the shelter of rascality and the in- 
strument of plunder; how to make it more and 
more the handmaid of liberty and the safeguard 
of well-being. So conceived and so followed, 
there is no more liberalizing, no more ennobling 
business on earth than the practice of the law; 
there is no occupation in which a man can grow 
faster, or win a more symmetrical and lustrous 
manhood. I will not promise the man who prac- 
tices law after that manner that he will get any 
hundred thousand dollar salaries; the predacious 
classes will have no use for him; but I think that 
he may hope for a decent livelihood; that he may 
win and hold the love and honor of his fellow 
citizens, and that he may come to his end with a 
good consciousness of having left the world better 
than he found it. 

It would be interesting to follow this analysis 
through all the vocations, but that would take a 
book. Let me speak of only two more, in both 
of which human faculties find large scope, and 
in which, if they were rightly conceived and used, 
the educational opportunity would be most 
inspiring. 

The first is the railway business. The vast 
proportion to which this business has grown, the 



22 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

enormous magnitude of the systems in which it 
is organized, makes one doubt whether it ought 
to be or can much longer be entrusted to any 
authority less supreme than that of the common- 
wealth. But as things are now the business is 
under private management; and the policy of 
every great railroad system is shaped and guided 
by a few men — often by one man. What I am 
thinking of is the immense educational oppor- 
tunity that comes to the man or the men on whom 
this responsibility rests. 

To a very large extent the welfare of the com- 
munity depends on the railways; they are the 
arteries of communication through which the 
life blood of commerce flows; if they are free and 
unobstructed the health of the nation is secure; 
if they are clogged or closed morbid conditions 
immediately appear. Few kinds of public serv- 
ice are, therefore, more important than that 
which is rendered by the manager of the great 
railway. The comfort, the safety, the prosperity, 
the well-being of the community are largely in 
his keeping. If he is permitted to regard this as 
his business, to be conducted by himself accord- 
ing to his own pleasure and for his own profit, 
he will exert tremendous power over the life and 
the liberty of the people. Whom he will he may 
set up, and whom he will he may put down. By 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 23 

slight and secret discriminations he may give 
one shipper or one community the advantage 
over another, enhancing the gains of some and 
sapping the resources of others. And where 
there Is no favoritism, the business may be so 
conducted as to be burdensome to the com- 
munity; the railroad may be loaded with fictitious 
debts, the Interest of which must be paid by the 
public; for It Is quite possible for railway managers 
to devote the larger part of their energy to the 
manipulation of the finances, greatly neglecting 
the practical management of the business. I 
have heard bitter complaints from subordinate 
railway officials that their chiefs were more 
concerned about the stock market than about 
transportation; that far too much of the railway 
business was done on Wall street. It is easy to 
point out systems in which the deterioration of 
the service is traceable to this cause. When the 
railway Is, in the manager's thought, mainly a 
mill for the grinding out of what are known as 
securities, and the railway business is largely 
the reorganization of properties and the multi- 
plication of debts and the floating of new issues, 
and all the manifold and exciting diversions of 
frenzied finance, the educational opportunity of 
the railway manager is not apt to be an inspiring 
one. That is not the kind of soil in which the 



24 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

finest manhood is apt to take root. The men who 
get their principal education in that school are not 
great men. They are great graspers, of course — 
great bosses, great buccaneers — but not great 
men. These operations of high finance have their 
root in unalloyed egoism; there is not a glimmer 
of consideration for the public good in any such 
transactions: many of them are barefaced rob- 
bery. It would be a grotesque conceit that 
men engaged in such occupations were in the 
way of developing their manhood. It is wolf- 
hood, not manhood, to which they are reaching 
forth. 

But I am thinking of the man with a social 
conscience — the man who identifies his interest 
with the interest of the commonwealth, and 
finds the recompense of his labor in the common 
good — I am thinking of this man and of the rail- 
way business as offering him a great field and 
a great opportunity. 

Surely, as we have seen, this business does 
connect itself very closely with the public welfare. 
Safe and cheap and reliable transportation has 
become one of the necessaries of life in our modern 
civilization. The railway has often become a 
great instrument of public plunder; but it may 
become a great helper of public well-being. And 
it is possible that a man of large intelligence and 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 25 

fine organizing ability should take up this business 
with the purpose, not of aggrandizing himself 
and his associates by means of it, but of making 
it serve the community in the most efficient way. 
To study railroading on the earth, and not finan- 
cial kite-flying in the air; to treat the railway 
system under his charge not as a culture-tank for 
the propagation of millions of fictitious capital, 
but as a great mechanism for the production of 
human welfare; to make the service as prompt 
and expeditious and cheap as it can be made; 
to reduce the horrible mortality among railway 
employes; to establish between the company and 
its servants relations of loyalty and friendliness, 
and to enlist their enthusiastic support in im- 
proving the service; to study the local conditions 
and industries in all the communities served, 
so as to make the railway meet their wants and 
develop their prosperity; to organize and direct 
this great public service so that it shall bear the 
burdens and supply the wants and minister to 
the happiness of all the people who live along 
the lines — this is surely a high and noble calling. 
Of course those who have loaned their money 
for the building and equipment of this road ought 
to have a reasonable return for the use of it, and 
that the manager would be bound to secure. 
Beyond that he would see that the earnings of 



26 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

the road were used for the improvement and 
cheapening of the service, and all the world would 
see that neither he nor any of those connected 
with him were heaping up colossal fortunes out 
of tribute levied on the patrons of the road. 
What a magnificent educational opportunity the 
railroad business would offer to a man who took 
it up with some such purpose, and kept that 
purpose steadily before his mind! He would 
get his education in his work, and what a man 
it would make of him! How wide would be the 
range of his technical and scientific knowledge; 
how much he would have to learn about human 
nature, and human conditions and needs, and 
the common life of the people; how broad would 
his outlook be upon social tendencies and world 
movements! And out of such a purpose to serve 
his fellow men, to make the conditions of life 
freer and fairer for the multitude, what an en- 
largement and ennoblement of character would 
surely come to him. He could not, of course, 
leave to his heirs the power to live in luxury upon 
the earnings of this railway, for that power he 
had never sought; but he could leave to his chil- 
dren the legacy of a noble name, and his monu- 
ment would be a great industrial organization 
whose ruling law was public service instead of 
public plunder. 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 27 

The other business that I had in mind is that 
of insurance, particularly life insurance. Here, 
now, is a business which connects itself even more 
obviously with human welfare. It is not needful 
to expatiate on this. You have listened more 
than once to the eloquence of the agents. What 
they tell you about the beneficence of the busi- 
ness is substantially true; when conducted upon 
legitimate lines it is a wise provision for future 
needs. All this involves large accumulation of 
trust funds to meet the maturing claims of the 
insured; and to guard these funds vigilantly, to 
invest them securely, to husband them judiciously, 
to administer the whole business so that the 
cost of insurance shall be as low as possible, con- 
sistent with safety, and to make it all tributary 
to the welfare of the insured — this is what life 
insurance professes to do, and what, I have no 
doubt, in some good degree, it often does. Clearly 
it is not, by original intention, a scheme by which 
a few persons heap up enormous gains at the 
expense of the insured. It is not contemplated 
that the managers of these companies shall build 
themselves palatial homes or pay themselves 
princely stipends out of the funds collected for 
the widows and orphans of the insured, and it 
is not easy to understand how men who have 
done such things can look in the glass without 



28 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

blushing. Much less Is it conceivable that the 
managers of such companies would take these 
trust funds and use them in enterprises of their 
own, enriching themselves by the gains that 
belonged to the insured. 

When the business of life insurance is managed 
in this way, the educational opportunity is not 
large, and the kind of men that are made by 
this process are not great men. Of this fact we 
have had some pitiful and startling demonstra- 
tions. We saw the test suddenly and searchingly 
applied to several such, and what became of 
them? They had loomed large in the financial 
world — colossi we had esteemed them; how 
quickly they shriveled and vanished from the 
sight of men — broken, humiliated, stripped of 
their dignity, shorn of their power! It is quite 
clear that the life insurance business conducted 
as an instrument of plunder is not a school in 
which to produce great men. 

But the life insurance business, held firmly to 
its true purpose, conducted as an agency for the 
promotion of thrift, and making provision for 
future needs, might be a splendid school for the 
development of high and strong character. The 
fidelity, the intelligence, the knowledge of safe 
and prudent finance, which are called for in the 
administration of such a trust make large de- 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 29 

mands on human nature. It must be that safe 
insurance can be furnished at a cost far below 
the ordinary charges; for after all the extrava- 
gance and robbery and waste of the great com- 
panies, they remain still strong and solvent; and 
this would seem to demonstrate that there is a 
large field for the application of safe economies 
to the business of insurance. Splendid work is 
waiting to be done in this field — work that will 
call for the finest qualities of mind and heart. 
It is one of many callings in which, if a man will 
apply to it brains and conscience and good will, 
he may work out great results for humanity; and 
in the work find the opportunity of developing 
to the full his own manhood. 

I trust that these illustrations drawn from 
widely different fields of human activity have 
helped to make plain the truth which we set out 
to enforce — that we get our best education in our 
daily work, when that work is chosen because it 
is tributary to the common good and is con- 
sciously pursued with that end in view. I hope 
that we shall be able to see that there is room for 
such social aims in all legitimate callings, and a 
chance therefore for every one of us. In our daily 
work, to win something better than wealth — 
even a large and fair manhood and womanhood. 
And is it not clear that a community made up 



30 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

of such men and women would come near to 
realizing heaven upon earth? 

In placing such a scheme of life before these 
young men and women, I do not, however, con- 
ceal from myself the fact that one serious dis- 
couragement confronts them. What I have been 
urging is that they identify their personal in- 
terests with the commonwealth; that they find 
their largest recompense in the thought that they 
are promoting the common welfare. But here 
are civic and political organizations in the city, 
the state and the nation which are supposed to 
represent the common welfare — governments of 
the people, which ought to be governments by 
the people and for the people; what encourage- 
ment do they offer, what helps do they hold out 
to those who would organize their lives upon 
the plan which I have been urging? Take the 
people who are managing our poHtics and ad- 
ministering our governments, by and large, and 
what is their attitude toward such a proposition 
as I have been advocating? Are they as a class 
consistently directing all their endeavors toward 
the public good, and making private gain a 
wholly subordinate consideration? They are 
surely the people who are pledged to such a course 
of action. Whatever may be true of the rest of 
us, there can be no question that this is what they 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 31 

are supposed to do, and what they are in honor 
bound to do. How is it with them? 

Every one of us knows that there are men in 
the public offices to whom the common good is 
the paramount concern, and who are honestly 
working to secure it with all their powers. If 
all were such this would be a happy nation. But 
every one of us knows also that great multitudes 
of those to whom the interests of the common- 
wealth are committed are quite ready to sacrifice 
the common good to private gain or advantage. 
And it is, at least, an open question whether the 
prevailing tendency among those who are charged 
with the public administration is not to use pub- 
lic office for self-aggrandizement more than for 
service. 

It is even a question whether the theory of 
government, as popularly held, makes room for 
such a motive as that on which we have been 
thinking. There is, indeed, in the preamble of the 
national constitution, one clause which recognizes 
the duty of the government to "promote the 
general welfare," but the implications of that 
clause have always been disputed; there are 
many who contend that it is not the nation's 
business to promote welfare, whether general or 
special; that it has no other function than to 
keep the peace, and lay down certain rules for 



32 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

the regulation of the competitive game, and then 
leave every one free to promote his own welfare 
in his own way. The prevailing idea of our polit- 
ical science has been that there is no common 
good, other than liberty, which the nation is 
organized to promote; that all it has to do is to 
provide a free arena, in which individuals may 
compete for such good things as are within their 
reach. The idea of a large organized co-operation 
for common ends, through the city or the state 
or the nation, has been regarded by most as a 
political heresy. It is true that we have been 
practically moving away from that position; we 
have been learning to co-operate more and more, 
but always under protest — always with the mis- 
giving that in cherishing common economic aims 
we were violating the fundamental principles of 
our democracy. 

It seems to me that we are confronting here 
one of the serious problems of our democratic 
state. It has been made very plain in our study 
this morning that no man can reach the highest 
manhood unless he identifies his personal aims 
with the common welfare; and yet our govern- 
ment seems to be organized upon the assumption 
that the only welfare with which we are con- 
cerned is individual welfare. Is it rational to 
expect that citizens will cherish social aims when 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 33 

the state is based on individualistic theories? I 
do not believe that it Is. And I am persuaded 
that a considerable revision of our fundamental 
ideas concerning democracy has got to take 
place along these lines, in order that we may 
make our public morality coincide with our 
private morality; In order that when the farmer 
and the teacher and the doctor and the lawyer 
and the railway manager and the Insurance pro- 
moter and all the rest take up the purpose of 
making their work contribute to the common 
good, they may distinctly see and know that 
their work is included in and co-operant with the 
highest aims of the state and the nation. In 
short, I think that our democracy has got to be 
moralized, in its conscious aims; that It must be 
something more than an umpire among fighters; 
that it must be a promoter of good will and mu- 
tual helpfulness among friends; that it must 
learn to cherish visions of a good that may be 
shared by all and promoted by common effort, 
and make plain the paths that lead to it. Democ- 
racy in its deepest meaning Is more than liberty, 
it is brotherhood; that meaning we must lift 
into the light. Never until this larger faith is 
cherished by the nation, and Incarnated In 
the life of the nation, shall we be able to 
keep alive in the hearts of the citizens those 



34 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

social aims in which their highest manhood 
is realized. 

It may be said that we shall never have a 
socialized nation until the individual citizens are 
socialized; but that is a little like saying that we 
shall never have a socialized family until the 
children are socialized. It is the life of the or- 
ganism that shapes the life of its members. When 
it is seen that the common bond is brotherhood 
we may begin to hope that the people will begin 
to act brotherly. It is true, of course, that here 
as in all things vital and spiritual, the action is 
reciprocal; brotherly men help to make a broth- 
erly nation; public and private moralities react 
upon each other; the ideals of the commonwealth 
inspire the citizen and the fidelities of the citizen 
find fruitage in the commonwealth. 

Thank God for the signs we see that the larger 
meaning of the national life is beginning to gain 
entrance to the thought of the people and to 
shape the national policies. I am sure that these 
young men and women, who go forth with the 
purpose of finding work In which they can make 
their lives tributary to the common good, will 
find the life of the city and the state and the na- 
tion coming continually into closer harmony with 
their central purpose. They themselves will help 
to lift up the national ideals; they will be part of 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 35 

that larger life into which the nation is leading 
them. 

I have kept you long enough, young men and 
women; I must not tax your patience further. 
I have tried to fix your thought, in this last hour 
of your undergraduate life, upon questions most 
central and vital in your future experience; I 
hope that a few things have been made plain. 
That the nation and the state want you to go on 
and complete the education which they have 
helped you here to begin, to make the most of 
yourselves, each one to complete a large, fair, 
fruitful personality; that this will be done if it 
is done at all, in the work by which you gain your 
livelihood, and that it can only be done when 
the excellence and the beneficence of that work, 
rather than the gain which you gather from it, 
become the chief motive in your life — all this, 
I hope, has been made credible. 

I look forward with you to the days of happy 
labor which lie before you in which you shall 
many times verify the great saying of Emerson, 
that the reward of a good work is to have done it. 
I hope that some of you who go forth to take 
possession of the land, under the old commission 
to dress it and to keep it, may hold before your 
minds a life like that of Luther Burbank; may 
have no more care than he has had for the things 



36 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

that all the world Is seeking; may know something 
of his glorious passion for making a better world 
of this, and may become, by the methods that 
he has followed, truly educated men and women. 

I hope that there may be many among you who 
will find the shining paths that led Faraday and 
Agassiz, not to millionism, but to the summits 
of great achievement In the enlargement of hu- 
man knowledge and well-being. 

I hope that there may be those among you 
who will learn to marshal men, and lead them, 
with never a hint of conflict, in the ways of 
peaceful industry; for the great industrial honors 
of the next generation are to be won not by pro- 
ducers of goods, but by employers of men. The 
one business which employers of labor most need 
to learn. Is the business of the employer. 

I hope that as lawyers such careers as those of 
Romilly and Brougham, of Marshall and Story 
may give you some hint of the Ways in which 
you may serve your country and mankind, and 
If there are no signal instances of the railway 
manager or the Insurance promoter who have 
cared more to make great men of themselves by 
public service than to make millionaires of them- 
selves by financial manipulations, the path is 
free before some of you to those high fields of 
fair renown. 



THE SCHOOL OF WORK 37 

In the service of the state there is no dearth of 
splendid examples of that clear purpose on which 
we have been looking — of men who rose to great- 
ness by making their work supreme and putting 
the stipend behind their backs — from Washing- 
ton, who led the armies of the Revolution for 
seven years without a penny of compensation 
of his services, and Lincoln who guided the na- 
tion through its crucial conflict with no dream 
of any higher reward than the privilege of serving 
and suffering — to many a valiant soul, still serv- 
ing, who has never asked of his country or of 
the world anything better than the privilege of 
doing with his might whatever his hand should 
find to do. None of these men was ever a self- 
seeker; all of them have made themselves what 
they were by identifying their lives with the na- 
tion that they loved and finding their reward in 
the privilege of service. 

This is the path that is open to-day before all 
of you, and I can have no better wish for any of 
you than that you may find the entrance to it 
now and walk on in it with strength and joy to 
the end of your days. 



II 

CASTLES IN THE AIR 



II 

CASTLES IN THE AIR 

I REMEMBER a bright story, a children's 
story, by Mr. Thomas Dunn English, printed 
in one of the newspapers some years ago, of 
a strange country, some realm in fairyland, where 
the natural laws and processes were precisely the 
reverse of those with which we are familiar, and 
where, consequently, the mechanical and artificial 
methods were the opposites of ours. It is the same 
conception, substantially, as that of Lewis Carroll 
in his story of "Looking Glass Land." In this 
curious country of Mr. English's the houses were 
built on a very different plan from that generally 
followed by our contractors. Instead of digging 
a hole in the ground and laying the foundation 
first, these carpenters of fairyland began at the 
top and built downward. The first parts of the 
house finished were the tops of the chimneys; 
the ridge pole came next, then the roof, the eaves, 
and so on down to the ground; the foundation 
and the cellar were the last work done. 

This strikes us, of course, as do all of Alice's 
Experiences in Looking Glass Land, as a gro- 
41 



42 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

tesque conceit, the wit of which consists in its 
flagrant violation of all scientific probabilities. 
The country where your finger begins to bleed 
now because you are going to prick it by and by, 
and where you remember what is going to happen 
next week, and where you are whipped to-day 
for the transgression you will commit to-morrow, 
and where, generally, the effects come first and 
are followed by these causes, is certainly a more 
marvellous country even than that wonderful 
Nowhere which Sir Thomas More saw in his 
beautiful dream. But It Is a good thing for us, 
now and then, to shake ourselves free from the 
tyranny of the formal logic, even by the aid of 
such whimsical conceits as these of the children's 
story-writers, and to transport ourselves into 
those realms when there are other tests of verity 
besides the syllogism and the multiplication 
table. Mr. English's quaint conceit about the 
architecture which comes down from above con- 
tains food for reflection. 

Much of our building, and not the least useful 
part of it, really follows these laws of fairyland. I 
find, for illustration, no less keen a thinker than 
Henry Thoreau saying this: "If you have built 
castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that 
is where they should be: now put foundations un- 
der them." Come to think of it castles always 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 43 

are built in the air, often pretty high in the air; 
though it is not generally supposed that they 
were first hung up in that medium, and the 
foundations afterward put under them. Yet 
even this may seem, when we reflect upon it, 
not altogether untrue. Is not every castle at 
first, very literally, a castle in the air? Does it 
not first exist in the mind of the architect, an 
ethereal, unsubstantial structure, fashioned of 
such stufi" as dreams are made of? Does not 
this vision hang in the air over the spot which 
the castle is designed to occupy, suspended there 
by the architect's imagination? Moreover, is 
not the castle or the house always built, in this 
way, before the foundation? Is the foundation 
the first thing in the thought of the architect? 
Not at all. It is the superstructure, the general 
form and outline of it, the whole, made up of 
many parts, in their relations, that he first con- 
ceives. The foundation is an afterthought. The 
contractor, the mechanic, must begin, of course, 
with the foundation; but it is not so with the 
architect. For although the ground on which 
the building is to stand, and the surroundings of 
the building do, in some cases, materially affect 
the design of the architect, it is true, as a general 
rule, that it is the superstructure of which the 
architect first forms his conception; he fits his 



44 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

foundation to his building, and not his building 
to its foundation. He does not, indeed, follow 
the whimsical method of Mr. English's builders 
in fairyland by constructing the chimney tops 
and the ridge poles first, but the building as an 
architectural whole first takes shape in his mind 
before he thinks of the foundation that he will 
put under it. 

In the building of houses, as well as of castles 
in Spain, a considerable part of the process goes 
on in the realm of imagination, of ideality; and 
that part of the process does not conform to 
the laws of matter, the laws of mechanics, but 
frequently takes directions and follows laws 
which are exactly antithetical to these material 
laws. 

Thus we see that in the most common of our 
daily labors we are really dwelling in two worlds, 
and that the regimen of one of these is sharply 
contrasted with the other. Some there are who 
have most to do with the material world, and 
who are apt to think that the processes and suc- 
cessions of the material world alone are worthy 
of consideration; and others who devote so much 
of their time in the immaterial or ideal world that 
they lose their hold on tangible facts. But, in 
truth, we are all denizens of both these realms; 
the laws of both of them govern some portions 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 45 

of our lives; none of us can be such a slave to 
sense that he does not have some commerce with 
the world of ideality, and none can be so visionary 
that he is not sometimes compelled to confront 
and reckon with hard material realities. And 
it is well for us frankly to recognize the dual 
nature of the life which we must live, and to make 
the proper provision for both sides of it. 

That the facts and forces of the material world 
must always condition and greatly modify the 
development of our ideal or spiritual lives is not 
to be denied; but, on the other hand, the ideal 
conceptions and the spiritual powers in us are 
all the while descending upon the material realm, 
imposing their own normative moulds upon its 
plastic substances; shaping its products according 
to their patterns. We must have stone masons, 
and we must also have architects. The one begins 
with digging in the earth or blasting the rocks 
for his foundation; the other begins in the imma- 
terial realm and fashions his structure there. 
The architect brings the building down out of 
empty space to earth, the stone mason or the 
carpenter builds it up from the earth into the 
air. Sometimes, very often indeed, the builder 
is his own architect; he rears the edifice first in 
his imagination, and then proceeds to put a 
foundation under it. 



46 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

This is the law of all creative work. The 
invention is first a castle in the air. The inventor 
conceives it, sees it, with his mind's eye, hanging 
in empty space, then proceeds to give it concrete 
existence. First it floats in the air, then it rests 
on the earth. 

A method of conveying sound through great 
distances by the use of the electric current — this 
is the dream; it haunts the brain of more than 
one curious and daring thinker; it is a castle in 
the air; who will be first to put a substantial 
foundation under it.^ Bell is his name; the tele- 
phone is what we call his apparatus. 

Steam is a force: it lifts the lid of the tea-kettle; 
it is known to act sometimes with terrific energy: 
can it be harnessed? can it be made to drive ma- 
chinery.^ That is the query that fills many minds 
for generations: by many rude devices it was 
imperfectly answered; finally the perfected ma- 
chinery of Watt put a firm foundation under this 
castle in the air. Thus every invention ger- 
minates in an idea; it may be a great, comprehen- 
sive idea, or an idea relating only to some mere 
matter of detail; but first it appears in the ideal 
world; then the inventor's problem is to get it 
down to earth; to cause it to materialize. 

We may go a little deeper than this and main- 
tain that the normative principles of science are 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 47 

in our own minds, and not in the material realm. 
The mind brings to the world its own terms of 
explanation. We do not dig our science out of 
the earth, or hammer it out of the rocks or dissect 
it out of the tissues; the ideas of order, of unity, 
of resemblance, of force and cause, which give 
us science, are not primarily things, they are 
thoughts. Doubtless we converse with nature 
by the use of our senses. But our senses give us 
sensations, that is all — impressions of light, of 
sound, of touch, of taste; it is the discerning 
thought which arranges and organizes these 
impressions into knowledge. The mirror reflects 
the objects placed before it as the eye does; but 
the mirror does not see, nor does the eye; it is 
the mind that uses the eye as its instrument, 
which sees. Experience is, indeed, the method 
of knowledge. But what is experience? Experior, 
I find out. There must be some one there to find 
out before there can be experience. If you could 
bring all the phenomena of the universe, and 
dump them into an empty skull, there would be 
no knowledge then and no science. And that 
saying of mine is a Hibernicism; for what are 
phenomena; they are only impressions made 
upon a mind; when there is no mind there can 
be no phenomena. "The largest part of what I 
call Nature," says George Matheson, "never 



48 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

came to me through the five gates. Where did 
I get my idea of beauty? Came it from the hill- 
top or from the valley or from the plain? Nay, 
nor from anything without my own soul. Where 
did I get my sense of music? Came it from the 
vibrations of the air? All the vibrations in the 
world would not make one note of music; the 
kingdom of melody is within me. Where did I 
get my thought of natural law? Came it from 
the observations of science? Science itself would 
have been impossible if that thought had not 
been born before it. It came from my own mind, 
— from that sense of order which belongs to mind 
alone; I could never have seen it in the stars if 
I had not first felt it in my soul." 

As it is with the constructive and mechanical 
arts, as it is with science, so is it with every work 
of imaginative art. The conception is first, the 
realization follows. The Belvidere Apollo existed 
in the mind of the unknown sculptor before it 
ever found expression in marble. The Dresden 
Madonna was a divine ideality in Raphael's 
thought before her beauty ever shone upon the 
canvas. The Ode to Immortality kindled Words- 
worth's soul, as a sublime conception, before it 
took form in majestic verse. The Traiimerei of 
Schumann, the Pilgrims' Chorus of Wagner, was 
heard in the silence by the spiritual ear of the 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 49 

composer before its ravishing strains were ever 
borne upon the waves of air. 

It is in this great art of music, Indeed, that we 
find the most striking Instances of the separation 
of the spiritual fact from the material form. What 
is music? The dictionary says that it is a succes- 
sion of sweet and pleasing sounds, but that seems 
to me an inadequate definition. I can take a 
music score of a simple composition and sit down 
in perfect silence, and find through the eye a 
keen pleasure in music which I never heard. 
More than that; the most exquisite melodies 
and harmonies, that never were heard on earth, 
and never will be, have often floated through 
my mind at midnight, when the ticking of the 
clock and the beating of my own heart were the 
only sounds that I could hear. Music is some- 
thing more than a succession of sweet and pleas- 
ing sounds. Indeed some of the greatest music 
that the world has ever heard was composed by 
a -man who when he composed it was stone deaf — 
who never heard it himself, with the outward ear, 
and who yet enjoyed it, I dare say, more than 
any one of the millions who have heard it since. 
It seems pathetic to read of Beethoven's com- 
posing the Solemn Mass, the Ninth Symphony, 
and the Sonata Pathetique, when the tones of 
the piano and the organ and the orchestra were 



50 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

totally inaudible to his outward ear; and to recall 
that notable evening when his Messa Solennis 
was performed in Vienna, in his presence, but 
not in his hearing, and when it was not until one 
of the singers turned him round to see the au- 
dience, that he was able to realize, from the 
spectacle of the excited multitude, with their 
waving hats and handkerchiefs and their shining 
faces, how powerful an impression the music had 
made. It is not true, perhaps, that one who was 
born deaf could ever comprehend music; but it 
is perfectly true that to one who once has entered 
into its secret, sound ceases to be essential to its 
enjoyment; musical ideas, apart from sound, give 
great pleasure; and always, in the creation of 
music, the ideal is first, and afterward its expres- 
sion In sound. 

Thus it becomes evident that all finest products, 
all greatest structures, have their origin in the 
world of the ideal, and find their way down from 
that lofty realm into the world of sense and fact. 
The building of castles in the air is not then quite 
so visionary and unproductive business as we 
have sometimes been led to regard it. Neverthe- 
less these visions of ours are not of much value 
unless we can somehow realize them. To get 
a substantial underpinning under our air castle; 
to bring it down from the sky and plant it 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 5 1 

firmly upon the earth, this Is our problem. Day- 
dreaming Is a very ruinous occupation when It Is 
followed by no serious and strenuous efforts to 
accomplish the good which has kindled our imag- 
ination. 

Let us try to put our figures Into terms a little 
more prosaic. The relation to each other of these 
two sides of human life Is one that needs to be 
well understood. We must all be idealists; 
through all our minds crowds of fancies and 
possibilities and aspirations are always flitting; 
wishes, dreams, hopes, conjectures, schemes, re- 
port themselves in our consciousness: some of 
them are only transient guests; some of them press 
upon our thought very persistently; and our 
problem is to select from this motley throng of 
possibilities those which are worthy, and those 
which are practicable. Whether we have the power 
of generating ideals, by our own volition, I will 
not undertake to say, but we have certainly the 
power of selection among those that are presented 
to our minds; we may accept some and reject 
others; and I think we have also a large power 
of combination; we can take parts of some, and 
join them with parts of others, and thus pro- 
duce a whole more perfect than any conception 
which may come to us in moments of passive 
reflection. The best landscapes, perhaps, are 



5 2 COMMENCEMENT DAYS . 

compositions. They are not copies, in complete- 
ness, of any existing landscape; they are made up 
of bits of scenery, which the painter has found, 
here and there, and he shows the perfection of 
his art in combining them into a harmonious 
whole. The finest characters in fiction are com- 
positions of the same sort; traits of one person 
and another are skillfully woven together to make 
up an ideal personality, a moral and intellectual 
unity which is more perfect than any mere por- 
trait of a life is apt to be. And one important 
part of our education is in learning how to use the 
materials which imagination so lavishly supplies 
to us — how to prune our fancies of all which is 
grotesque and impracticable; how to chasten our 
imaginations; how to dismiss quickly the unworthy 
and the foolish conceit; how to hold on to the 
ideals that are pure and lovely and honorable, 
and how to combine them into forms which shall 
give dignity and glory to life. Experience helps, 
of course, in the sifting of these imaginations. 
Many things which we once dwelt upon as de- 
sirable we no longer wish for; we have tried to 
realize them and are convinced that they cannot 
be realized; perhaps we have learned to believe 
that they ought not to be realized. But experi- 
ence, unhappily, is not, in this department, an 
infallible teacher; she sometimes makes us be- 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 53 

lieve that things are impossible or impracticable, 
simply because labor and patience are required 
for their realization. Experience taught all the 
navigators of the old world but one that the 
Atlantic could not be crossed; it was the glory of 
Columbus that he refused to learn from experi- 
ence this disheartening lesson. Experience taught 
many of our statesmen in the dark days of 1862 
and 1863 that the preservation of an undivided re- 
public in the heart of this continent was a barren 
ideality, an utter impossibility, and made them 
think that our nation ought to retire from the 
struggle and suffer the dismemberment of Its 
empire; but the same experience taught Abraham 
Lincoln and Ulysses Grant that the union could 
be and must be preserved. I suppose that there 
are very few men living now, north or south, who 
are not glad that Lincoln's and Grant's interpre- 
tation of the lesson of experience was the one 
that prevailed. 

Experience is a good teacher, her lessons are 
well worth heeding, but she Is by no means In- 
fallible. Patrick Henry is reported to have said 
that he knew of no way of judging of the future 
but by the past. That was an unguarded saying. 
Was there no prophetic soul in this fiery orator, 
dreaming of things to come which the past had 
never seen? The future grows out of the past as 



54 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

the plant grows from the seed, but you can hardly 
judge by looking at the seed what the plant will be. 

"That which hath been," says the writer of 
Ecclesiastes, "is that which shall be, and that 
which hath been done is that which shall be done, 
and there Is nothing new under the sun." I have 
heard people try to justify this as a true and wise 
saying, but it is rank skepticism, bitter pessimism; 
you might as well justify what the fool says in his 
heart or what Bildad says to Job or what Satan 
says to Christ. All progress, all reformation, of 
men or of societies, all millennial hopes and aims 
spring from the belief that the thing which hath 
not been is the thing that shall be, and that the 
thing which hath not been done is the thing that 
shall be done. And this thing which the past has 
not seen and the future is to see, this thing that 
haunts our imagination and kindles our hope, that 
abides in the realm of the ideal and has not yet 
been realized, that is still a castle in the air wait- 
ing for its foundation, — this is one of the great 
forces of progress, one of the mighty strongholds 
of freedom and righteousness. 

It is evident that we must learn of the future 
not only from the past, but also from the throngs 
of prophetic wishes and hopes and imaginations 
that fill our souls continually. Multitudes of 
these doubtless, are ignes fatui; it is for us, as 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 55 

I have said, to learn to distinguish the heavenly 
lights from the wandering meteors, and to know 
which we may safely follow. 

Our common sense and our moral intuitions 
will help us much in making these distinctions. 
Many of the things that come into our heads we 
are able at once to dismiss as impracticable or 
wrong. But our common sense and our moral 
intuitions need training. How to train them, 
so that their judgment shall be prompt and 
sure — that is the question. And I think that what 
a great essayist has said about this is true: that 
this wisdom is cultivated "by means of getting 
to know, on all the matters which most concern 
us, the best which has been thought and said in 
the world; and through this knowledge, turning a 
stream of fresh and free thought upon our own 
stock notions and habits, which we now follow 
steadily and mechanically." 

The purification and correction of our ideals 
"by getting to know, on all the subjects which 
concern us, the best which has been said and 
thought in the world," — this is, indeed, a great 
part of our education. I would not undervalue 
such association as we can secure with the best 
of our neighbors and contemporaries, — with those 
of broadest knowledge, of purest purpose, of 
most unselfish lives. Such friendships are of 



56 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

great service to us, in clarifying our ideals. There 
is no influence so stimulating as that of life; it is 
always the light of men. But the need of great 
care in forming these friendships can hardly be 
overstated. It is only the wise and the brave 
and the unselfish from whom you can hope to 
receive any good gift. From the man who Is 
reputed to be most successful — the great grasper, 
the great imperator, the great egoist, you cannot 
keep too far away. You are far better off alone 
with your own musings than in some people's 
company. Nothing is better than a good friend 
and nothing worse than a bad one. 

Since, however, the stores of the world's noblest 
wisdom are open to us in books, we need never 
lack for higher and fairer companionship than 
the best of our neighbors is likely to furnish us. 
And therefore I would like to emphasize Arnold's 
maxim, once more, — only enlarging it a little. 
For I think that the purification and correction 
of our ideals will be effected by getting to know 
not only the best that has been said and thought 
in the world, but also the best which has been 
done in it. And I would emphasize the study of 
history and of biography, as good guides in the 
shaping of our ideals. For history will show us, 
on a very large scale, sometimes the nobility, 
and sometimes the futility, of our ideals. And 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 57 

biography — the best of It — the record of the few 
greatest lives — is fuller of light, I think, for you 
and me, than any other kind of writing. What 
bracing of the best resolves, what enkindling of 
the purest enthusiasms, what uplifting of the 
thoughts, what enlargement of the affections have 
come to some of us as we have read the lives of 
John Colet, and Thomas More, and Oliver Crom- 
well, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, and 
Frederick Robertson, and Charles Kingsley, 
and Horace Bushnell, and Phillips Brooks, and 
Thomas Henry Huxley, and Abraham Lincoln. 

But Arnold's word is very wholesome if we 
take it just as he has left it. There is great help 
for us all in other literature than history and 
biography, in getting to know on all the subjects 
which concern us, the best that has been said and 
thought in the world. The great essayists, the 
great novelists, the great poets have guidance 
and inspiration for us which we must not miss. 
Here, as with our flesh and blood friendships, we 
have need of discrimination; let us have among 
books no friends but the noblest. I cannot ven- 
ture here on any specific counsels; the field is too 
wide. I will only say that for that particular 
purpose which we are now considering — the 
purification of our Ideals — the great poets will 
be your best servants. The power to appreciate 



58 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

and enjoy the best poetry is one that every one 
of you should covet and cultivate. There is no 
purer or more elevating pleasure than that which 
you may receive in your intercourse with these 
great interpreters of the human soul. Whoever 
knows well his Shakespeare, and his Milton, and 
his Wordsworth, and his Scott, and his Burns, 
and his Tennyson, and his Robert and Elizabeth 
Browning, and his Longfellow, and his Whittier, 
and his Lowell, and his Sidney Lanier, has a wide 
world to live in, and a glorious sky over his head 
and shining paths for his thoughts through the 
times and the eternities. And no one here will 
be inclined to dispute that he who wishes to know, 
on the subjects which most deeply concern him, 
the best that has been said and thought in the 
world will find in that one Book which is, by the 
testimony of all candid witnesses, the book of 
conduct, the book of righteousness, the book of 
life, more light and help than he can find any- 
where else. They who use the Bible as a book 
of conduct, — a book of life, — not quarreling about 
the theory of its inspiration, but seeking to par- 
take of its inspiration; casting themselves upon 
the current of its great hopes and promises, 
drinking in the spirit of prophets and psalmists 
and apostles; sitting at the feet of the one divine 
and perfect Teacher and Guide, — will find their 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 59 

vision cleared and their judgment rectified, by 
the entrance of that word which giveth light, 
which giveth to the simple understanding. 

One more cautionary word needs to be spoken 
with respect to the dreams and visions of things 
possible which fill our minds. A good many 
people build more castles in the air than room can 
be found for on the earth. Their projects are too 
numerous to be realized. There is room in the 
air for innumerable castles; the space over our 
heads is limitless; we can pile these dream- 
structures, one upon another, tier above tier, 
but when we try to find a place for them upon 
the earth there is only a limited space at our 
command. I know some very good people whose 
lives have been failures from this very cause. 
Their minds were full of benevolent projects, far 
more than ground-room could possibly be found 
for in this crowded world. If they had bent their 
energies to putting foundations under a few of 
their air castles they would have accomplished 
vastly more. 

We have been speaking hitherto of our ideals 
as partial and fragmentary — as relating only to 
portions of life. Life is a whole made up of many 
parts; every action of life exists first in the ideal 
world and thence descends into the world of 
reality; and we have been thinking of these 



6q COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

separate actions; of the ideal elements which 
enter into them, and of the best means of getting 
them realized. But life as a whole is also an 
ideality. We think of life, especially in our 
younger days, as one complete and coherent 
scheme. We consider not merely how we should 
act in any single emergency, but we form some 
conception of what we would become; of the 
character that we would form, of the career that 
we would follow. One must be a great deal lower 
than the angels — not much higher than the 
brutes — not to feel the constant pressure of these 
great questionings. And just at this season when 
the doors of schools and academies and colleges 
are opening outward upon the world, and great 
companies of young men and women are passing 
out of the period of pupilage into that of active 
labor, this outlook upon life ought to be, and is, 
I have no doubt, in many cases, exceptionally 
serious. There is much building of air castles, 
in these days. What manner of life shall my 
life be.^ is the question that many of you are 
asking. We have seen that it is not a useless 
question. Your life will be shaped, quite largely, 
by these conceptions which you now entertain 
of what life ought to be. In the silent hours 
your prophetic soul is often dreaming of things 
to come. It is good business, if you follow it 



CJSTLES IN THE AIR 6l 

wisely, if you do not overdo It. And In these 
silent hours, If you listen well, you will sometimes 
hear the Father of your spirit, saying unto you, 
"What house will ye build me, and where Is the 
place of my rest?" No house can contain him, 
indeed: that was the mistake of the old religionists, 
who Imagined that they could shut his influence 
within their temples; but we may rear for him a 
habitation wherein he shall delight to dwell. 

"Dear Comforter, eternal love, 

If thou wilt stay with me, 
Of lowly thoughts and simple ways 

I'll build a house for thee." 

It is quite within our power to build for our- 
selves castles In the air of which the glory of 
God shall be the light. The pattern of the life 
we ought to live will be displayed to us In these 
hours of serious thought if we will but lift our 
eyes to the source of inspiration. And there Is 
no business more important than that of getting 
this pattern, in Its main features, fairly before 
our thought. 

What is the ideal of your life.? Have you 
settled it with yourself what you wish to be.? 
You may have no very definite plans, but have 
you not some general Ideas.? And what are 
they.? You hope for success in life, of course; 
and what do you mean by success.? What are 



62 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

the cardinal elements of success? When your 
thought reaches forward to those prosperous 
days which are coming, as you hope, by and by, 
what are the features of the picture on which 
you most love to dwell? That air castle which 
you are building, what does it look like, to your 
imagination? Is it a storehouse stocked with 
the wealth of the world? That, I fear, is the 
general plan of the structures which most of 
you are building. Is it a banqueting hall or a 
place of revelling? Is it a safe retreat in which 
you can shut yourself from disagreeable contact 
with the outside world? I ask you these ques- 
tions because I desire to help you to satisfy 
yourselves precisely what is the thought of life 
which you are cherishing and that it is a worthy 
thought. If you have any misgivings about that, 
do not rest until you have subjected this spiritual 
architecture of yours to a searching criticism. 
That is the one point at which you cannot afford 
to make a mistake. The pattern of the life you 
mean to live — get that, at any rate, distinctly 
before your thought. Tolerate no confusion, no 
uncertainty here. Have a good understanding 
with yourself as to what, in its main features, 
you wish and intend that your life shall be. 
Do not let this air castle of yours be a mere cloud- 
pile, formless, incoherent, constantly changing. 



CASTLES IN THE AIR 63 

It ought to be as sharply outlined as the archi- 
tect's plan is before he puts it on paper. Dwell 
upon its main design until it is well fixed in your 
own conception. And if you do this, I am toler- 
ably sure that the plan will be, on the whole, a 
worthy and noble one. I do not think that many 
of you are likely to form a definite plan of living 
a selfish, sordid, base, frivolous life. Such lives 
as these are not, generally, the result of a plan, 
but rather of the lack of plan. Men drift into 
these degradations. Don't drift. Know well 
whither you are going and be sure that you are 
going to the right place. Build your air castle. 
Take time enough to build it thoroughly and 
well. Build it after the heavenly pattern. Then 
by the grace of God bring it down to earth and 
put a foundation under it, a foundation of in- 
dustry and discipline and firm principle, that 
will stand after the everlasting hills have crum- 
bled into dust. 

You remember what the Revelator saw — that 
last sublime vision of his. It was the New Jerusa- 
lem, that great city, coming down out of heaven 
from God, coming down to earth. What is this 
city but the structure reared by the purified 
imaginations of good men, built up there in the 
heavenly silences, in the hours of quiet thought, — 
the perfect ideals of a glorified humanity born 



64 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

from above and descending upon the earth to 
take possession of it, and shape the life of the 
world, the life of home, and shop, and factory, 
and city, by the law of heaven? And we have to 
remember concerning this what one of deep 
insight has told us that " the New Jerusalem both 
descends and ascends. It is of the heavens, 
but it must be firmly built up and solidly but- 
tressed through its whole earthly superstructure. 
The humblest hod-carrier on the rising walls of 
the Holy City (for there is necessary spiritual 
toil which corresponds to what we wrongly call 
drudgery) does a nobler work than the self- 
absorbed angel, if such there can be, who flies 
lazily over it upon a cloud, giving no heart or 
thought or touch towards its uprearing. Every 
act of kindness, every sympathetic word, every 
righteous and loving life, however lowly, is a 
stone laid in the foundations of the city of God, 
to glow there forever as topaz, or sapphire, or 
amethyst." 

Your castle in the air, I trust, is one of those 
fair palaces of the golden city that is coming 
down out of heaven from God to fill the earth. 
Be diligent, then, with clear purpose and faithful 
service, to place beneath it a foundation firm and 
sure. 



Ill 

WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 



Ill 

WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 

TIERE is a little essay entitled "What is 
Worth While?" which has given its name 
to an extended series of similar little 
books. I have never read the original essay, but 
the familiar title of the series has often struck 
me as a most pregnant and pertinent inquiry. 
It suggests the thought that there is much that 
is not worth while: that a great many of us are 
making an uneconomical use of our possessions 
and opportunities, exchanging our goods for 
vanities, wasting our energies on what is worthless. 
And the suggestion comes home to us that a 
large part of wisdom must consist in getting out 
of the great variety of possible investments of 
time and resources, what is worth while. In the 
great exchanges of life we are spending freely 
time and thought and desire and labor: is it not 
of vast importance that we should get in return 
that which is compensatory? 

Some of us are convinced, no doubt, that we 
ought not to be living unto ourselves: that we 
ought to be doing what we can for others. But 



68 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

here, too, the same question arises. There are a 
good many unproductive philanthropies. Much 
of the labor that is put forth to make a better 
world of this is well meant, but it is not worth 
while. We spend our money for that which is 
not to the needy the bread of life and our labor for 
that which satisfieth neither him that gives nor 
him that takes. 

One could not hope to solve a practical problem 
so vast and complex as this in a few minutes' 
discussion; but we may get hints and admoni- 
tions that shall serve us for guidance in our daily 
choices, and some such meditation may be useful 
as we make up our plans for the years before us. 

First, then we may say that getting material 
things just for the sake of getting them or of hav- 
ing them is not worth while. There are many 
with whom this is the ruling motive. It is often 
concealed, it is rarely avowed, but it is the real 
motive in many strenuous lives. To argue about 
it is surely needless. It is sufficient to call at- 
tention to it as one of the portentous and de- 
structive delusions by which our human nature is 
constantly beguiled. That men outside of the 
lunatic asylum should expend the energies of their 
lives in heaping up money and material gains just 
for the sake of heaping them up; or accumulating 
vast wealth which they know that they can never 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 69 

use; in simply gratifying the craving for accumu- 
lation is, when you stop to think about it, a most 
astonishing fact. And yet I suppose about ninety- 
nine in every hundred of our population really 
regard those who are doing this thing as the most 
successful men of the day. The man who succeeds 
in getting a vast amount of property which he 
knows that he can never use, all of which he ex- 
pects to leave behind him when he dies — this is the 
successful man, according to the world's standard. 
And there is a vast multitude who think that this is 
the only thing that is really worth while. With 
such a habit of mind it is vain to argue. If a man 
should have one hundred oxen roasted for his 
individual dinner every day, when he knew that 
he could not eat more than one pound of beef; 
or if he should require the tailor to provide him 
with a thousand new suits of clothing every day, 
when he knew that he could not without great 
trouble wear more than two or three of them, 
we should say that he gave evidence of insanity. 
Such an enormous over-provision for personal 
wants betokens, we should say, an unsound mind. 
Is it really any more rational to make the same 
kind of preposterous provision for the wants of a 
lifetime — to heap up millions and tens and hun- 
dreds of millions for which, in the delver's own 
day, he can have no possible use. What kind of 



70 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

craze is in the head of the man that makes him 
think this worth while? 

Often those who are subject to this strong 
delusion justify themselves by saying that this 
extravagant provision is for their children. But 
here again the question returns: Is this worth 
while? Is it a good thing for children to deliver 
them from labor and care and responsibility — to 
take away from them the opportunities of man- 
hood and womanhood? My own observation 
would lead me to believe that fully four-fifths of 
those who inherit fortunes are hurt more than 
they are helped by them. It is only the excep- 
tional few who are not weakened and demoralized 
by such inheritance. I saw, one day, a photo- 
graph of a little lad of whom one said to me: "The 
boy has how three hundred thousand dollars, well- 
invested, in his own right; by the time he is of age 
it will be a large fortune; if only it doesn't ruin 
himl" It was a shrewd man of the world who 
said it and there was sadness in his tone. If I 
were in the business of insuring boys against 
physical and moral shipwreck, I think I should 
make the rates lower to healthy boys in the 
Children's Home than to boys on the Boulevard. 
Is it worth while to heap up riches for your chil- 
dren, when there are about four chances out of 
five that they will do them more harm than good? 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? yi 

Others are straining to accumulate large wealth 
because they wish to secure an amount of capital 
whose income will suffice to maintain them in 
comfort and perhaps in luxury without encroach- 
ing upon the principal. But is this worth while? 
Why insist on having so much that you must 
leave behind? It is worth while to lay by enough 
to maintain yourself in comfort, in case of sick- 
ness or disability: but a very moderate hoard 
would answer that purpose, if you calculated on 
using it during your lifetime, and not merely the 
income from it. But, at present rates of interest, 
it takes a pretty large sum to yield an Income 
sufficient for the maintenance of life. Is it worth 
while to try? That is the practical question. 
Would you not be wiser to content yourself with 
that which will probably suffice to keep you in 
comfort while you live, putting the energy of your 
life, after that is gained, into some other kind of 
enterprise than that of accumulation? 

I have no doubt that this question appears to 
some of you altogether sentimental and quixotic; 
the proposition thus to limit by a rational pur- 
pose the acquisition of wealth — to make money 
the servant of need and not the instrument of 
greed — will seem wholly unpractical. To bring 
Mammon down from his throne and make him 
the mere minister to our convenience and comfort 



72 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

will appear to many the reversal of the chief aim 
of life. But is it worth while after all to be the 
bond-slave of Mammon ? Is it worth while, as Mr. 
deed puts it to the Kansas farmers, " to be always 
raising more corn, to fatten more hogs, to buy 
more land, to raise more corn" et ad infinitum. 
And the same kind of treadmill is for every man 
whose main concern is making money, whether 
the dreary round is corn and hogs and land, or 
whether it is raw material and machinery and 
goods. Is it worth while? that is the question I 
am trying to get before your mind. How much 
of this is worth while.? Are there any limits here, 
and if so where are they.? 

Probably very few of those who listen to me 
have yet reached the point where accumulation 
has not some relation to actual or probable need. 
But the time may come to some of us when it 
will be a practical question whether we shall 
heap up money to leave behind us. And before 
that time comes it is well to have a clear under- 
standing with ourselves as to whether or not it is 
worth while. 

Let us go a step further, then, and say that it 
is worth while to live; that it is therefore worth 
while to accumulate the means of living; but 
that it is not worth while to multiply means 
which can never be used, or to turn the means 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 73 

of living into the end of life and thus invert the 
very order of existence. If a man has a well 
he needs a rope and a bucket; but he does not 
need a hundred thousand bales of rope and a 
million buckets to draw water out of this one 
well. 

It is worth while to live, I say. And what 
does this involve.^ 

It means, first, the possession of a healthy and 
vigorous body. Steady nerves, good digestion, 
abundant physical strength and endurance — this 
is always worth while. We are justified in think- 
ing of this, in caring for it, in providing for our- 
selves, so far as we are able, the food and the 
fresh air and the exercise and the genial surround- 
ings which minister to health. The discipline 
which gives bodily vigor is never to be despised 
unless it unduly exalts bodily vigor. It is worth 
while to be athletic but it is not worth while to 
be an athlete; for an athlete is apt to be one to 
whom the strength and agility of the body have 
become the principal thing. Here, again, ends 
are sacrificed to means. The body at its best 
estate is servant and not master: the athlete 
inverts the order of nature. Nothing is worth 
while which tends to put the lesser above the 
greater or to discrown the royalty of the human 
soul. 



74 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

It IS worth while to have a well filled and a well 
trained mind. Wisdom is the principal thing; 
therefore get wisdom, and with all thy gettings 
get understanding. Many of the things you 
get in your exchanges you may well let go at 
less than cost: but the wise man bids you buy 
the truth and sell it not. Here is one commodity 
of which you can never have too much and with 
which you cannot afford to part at any price. 

Mental equipment consists of knowledge and 
discipline. To know facts that are worth know- 
ing; to know what they mean and how they are 
related to each other; to know how to observe 
and to compare and to weigh and judge and 
reason — this is the mental equipment which we 
do well to covet. 

To know facts which are worth knowing. A 
vast amount of that which is thrust upon you, 
which clamors for your attention, which screams 
at you in the headlines and prattles to you in 
the parlors, and jabbers at you in the gossip of 
the society columns, Is decidedly not worth 
knowing; nay, the effect of It upon your mind 
must be much the same as would be the effect 
upon your stomach of a diet of sawdust garnished 
with cayenne pepper. 

We are sometimes told by the realists that all 
facts are significant. Possibly, in some aspects, 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 75 

for some minds, and for some purposes; but far 
the larger part of the mere details of other peo- 
ple's domestic and personal concerns are not 
only of no significance to you but you are be- 
fouled and belittled by the knowledge of them. 
Not all the facts of nature are worth knowing. 
The garbage pile in your back alley is a fact, 
but knowledge of the exact composition of it 
would not add to your wisdom. Out of the mul- 
titude of things knowable let us try to fill our 
minds with things worth knowing. 

There is a sectarianism of culture which we 
shall do well to avoid. Each specialist in knowl- 
edge has his own notion of what is worth knowing 
and often has scant regard for that which lies 
outside his lines. The man of science often 
sneers at philosophy and history and literature; 
and they of the other guilds undervalue his pur- 
suits. But we must not disparage any of these. 
Science gives us the facts in their relations; 
philosophy tells us what they mean. It is worth 
while to know all we can about the interplay of 
the natural forces, about the processes of life, 
about the manner in which living things have 
come to be. Great and wonderful are the revela- 
tions of the telescope and the microscope and the 
spectroscope, of the combustion tube and the 
retort, of the geologist's rock hammer and the 



76 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

archaeologist's spade. And if this is God's world; 
if Nature is only the loom whose shuttles of force 
are weaving for God the garment by which we 
see him, then all this knowledge when it is set 
in order, and its relations are understood, must 
bring us into the very presence chamber of the 
Creator himself. A little of this kind of learning 
may be a dangerous thing; but the complete 
induction will bring the irresistible conviction 
that we are evermore in the presence of Him in 
whom we live and move and have our being. 

But we must not forget that he who lives and 
works in Nature lives also and reveals himself 
even more clearly in the lives of the men who are 
made in his image. Here is a revelation of him 
far more important to us than that which is 
made along the lines of the physical forces. 
Through the movements of the tribes and the 
peoples, their crude endeavors after domestic 
relations and social unities, the operation of 
those attractions of community and fraternity 
which have been extending and strengthening 
from millennium to millennium, we see the pa- 
tient love of God educating his children, and 
leading them on in the way of life. The dis- 
asters and overturnings that overtake them are 
simply the signs of his presence among them — 
the chastenings of a Father who loves his children 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE ? J'J 

too well to let them go to ruin, without many 
sharp reminders of their folly. And therefore 
the whole of history, when broadly and carefully 
studied, is but the record of revelation; the in- 
stinctive and spontaneous movements of men 
toward unity and co-operation are the outworking 
of the divine thought implanted in their nature; 
and the retributions and overturnings are all 
signs of the Presence of one who worketh ac- 
cording to the counsel of his will in the armies of 
heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; 
all point onward to 

"One far off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves." 

And not less clearly is this revelation made in 
the great literatures of the world. The greatest 
of these we call the sacred literatures. They 
are not all alike; they are not of equal value; if 
you wish to know which is best study their fruits 
in the lives of the peoples. There is truth in all 
of them; in every one of them thoughts of God 
have struggled into utterance; there is not one 
of them which is not somewhat obscured by the 
human medium through which it has come; but 
there are great differences among them; in some 
the light shines far more clearly than in others. 
In these last days they are brought together and 



78 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

compared as never before in history: each must 
shine by its own light: each must endure the test 
of comparison with all the others. The law of 
the survival of the fittest is now at work among 
them. Are any of you in doubt as to the outcome 
of this conflict.^ 

In the great literatures of the world the Spirit 
of all truth must surely be revealing himself. 
Where else can we learn so much concerning him 
as in the thoughts of the men who are made for 
fellowship with him, and with whom he holds 
communion? There may be error and aberration 
here, 

"For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent 
in a pool," — 

but through all these reflections and refractions 
the Light that lighteth every man finds its way 
into the world. It is in the realm of the spirit 
that God, who is a Spirit, most clearly reveals 
himself; and literature contains the record of the 
realm of the spirit. The one thing most im- 
portant for us to know is what the best men — 
those nearest to God — have thought and felt in 
all the ages. There is nothing therefore which 
it is so well worth while for us to know as the 
great sacred literatures — and, of course, the 
greatest and the best of them is that which we 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 79 

ought first and most thoroughly to know. And 
if there ever was upon the earth, as I believe 
there was, One whose unique function it was 
to manifest God in the life of a man, then the 
one thing best worth knowing is the revelation 
that was made in his words and his life. Of all 
knowledges this must be supreme. Of all kinds 
of ignorance, that which obscures this light must 
be most melancholy. It is worth while for Chris- 
tian men to know their Bible, and to know all 
that it can tell them about Him who, by the con- 
fession of the world's greatest minds, is the Light 
of the world. 

No other literature, I say, can be of so great 
value to us as that which brings to us the revela- 
tion of God in Christ. But there is much besides 
this which It is well worth our while to know, 
because It discloses to us the history of the human 
soul, which, of all histories, Is the most Instructive 
and the most stirring. The epics, the dramas, 
the songs, the romances show us the human soul 
grappling with the great problems of duty and 
destiny, seeking to fathom the mysteries of life, 
trying to reconcile Its contradictions and to 
answer its deepest questions. They are not all 
of equal value; many of them do little more than 
make the darkness visible; there Is need here, 
also, of rigid selection; but in the best of them 



8o COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

there is great illumination and stimulus; he who 
knows little or nothing of the friendships of the 
best books is deprived of one of the great sources 
of enjoyment and inspiration. 

It is worth while to have not merely the cogni- 
tive powers of the mind disciplined for the in- 
vestigation of Truth, but the taste and the 
imagination also trained for the perception and 
enjoyment of the Beautiful. Something of that 
we gain through our knowledge of the best litera- 
ture; but other forms of beauty than those which 
are expressed in words appeal to us on every side, 
and it is well worth while to be fitted to respond 
to their appeal. Beauty, not less than Truth 
and Love is a divine attribute: no man knows 
God, in any adequate sense, whose soul is not 
keenly responsive to all forms of beauty. And 
this responsiveness can be cultivated, just as 
much as the muscles can be strengthened or the 
mathematical powers developed. Some are by 
nature more sensitive to this revelation than 
others, but there are few who may not greatly 
increase their power of enjoying the beautiful. 
And if it be the chief end of man to glorify God 
and enjoy him forever, then it must be worth 
while to qualify ourselves for that revelation of 
God in the Beauty of Nature which is of all the 
direct disclosures of him in the natural world 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 8 1 

the one most clear and most inspiring. We 
may sometimes question the goodness of God 
as Nature reveals him, but his beauty who can 
gainsay? And it is well worth our while to have 
a mind and a heart on which these manifestations 
of the divine glory quickly impress themselves; 
a nature sensitive to the light and shadow, the 
form and color, the melody and harmony of this 
wonderful world; a soul that is sensitive to the 
touch of those influences by which God makes 
himself known to us in the works of his hands. 
Surely it is worth while in these bountiful summer 
days to take the gifts of God so freely proffered, 
the blooms of meadow and garden, the grandeurs 
of forest and mountain, the glories of sea and sky 
— to open the heart to the grace which comes 
to enrich and inspire and ennoble us, to cleanse 
our thoughts from the defilement of earth's 
selfishnesses and vanities, to make us free of that 
realm where nothing sordid or cruel is ever per- 
mitted to enter. 

Finally, let me say, it is worth while to enter 
fully into all the significance of the truth that no 
man liveth to himself. Not merely to truth and 
beauty must the soul be responsive, but, above 
all, to the claims of humanity. No man truly 
lives who does not accept the great opportunities 
and responsibilities of our common life. It is 



82 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

worth while for every man to take his part man- 
fully in the tasks that belong to us as social beings. 
To live an isolated life, a life whose motives and 
aims and ends are all within itself is very de- 
cidedly not worth while. It is not only unprofit- 
able, it is impossible. There are some who seem 
to try to be as exclusive as they can, and the 
penalty is a desolation more terrible than death, 
for the soul thus shut out from her kind, knows 
the doom so vividly delineated in the Palace of 
Art. 

"She mouldering with the dull earth's mouldering sod, 

Inwrapt tenfold in slothful shame, 
Lay there exiled from the eternal God, 

Lost to her place and name; 

"And death and life she hated equally, 

And nothing saw for her despair 
But dreadful time, dreadful eternity, 

No comfort anywhere: 

"Remaining utterly confused with fears, 

And ever worse with growing time, 
And ever unrelieved by dismal fears, 

And all alone in crime." 

No: There are no possibilities of happiness for 
human souls in this or any other world save those 
which bind them close together in human fellow- 
ship, which make the welfare of all the supreme 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 83 

concern of each. This means that the burdens 
of all must rest upon the heart of each: that 
the battles of all must enlist the courage and 
endurance of each. It means conflict, sacrifice, 
suffering for every one. It is idle to imagine that 
we can separate ourselves from our kind and go 
on and up to fortune and happiness leaving the 
rest behind; we may wish to do it but we shall not 
be able: that fortune will have a curse at the heart 
of it, and that happiness will be mildewed and 
cankered, and the curse and the blight will find 
us sure, in this world or another. Do you imagine 
that you can tamper with the eternal Righteous- 
ness.^ No; it is not worth while to try to live in 
this world as though you owed nothing to your 
neighbor; that debt of love is never remitted, 
and there is no bankrupt's court in the eternities 
in which you can get your discharge; you must 
pay it before you will ever enter into peace or 
freedom. 

But it is worth while to acknowledge it here and 
now, and to pay it promptly and freely. Nothing 
is so well worth while for any of us as to accept 
with gladness all the responsibilities that belong to 
our common life and to play our part in them like 
men. 

So then we may answer our question, "What 
is worth while.'"' by saying. It is worth while to 



84 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

live; and life means a body sound and strong to 
serve the soul; a mind stored with highest truth 
and trained for noblest service; a soul quick and ; 

sensitive to the beauty of the universe; a heart 
attuned to the love that is the fulfilling of the 
law of heaven and earth. The greatest of these 

elements of life is love. I 

I 
"For life with all it yields of joy and woe, \ 

And hope and fear — believe the aged friend — 
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love, 
How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is." 

That is the one certain, indubitable, all inclusive 
good. "For every one that loveth is begotten of 
God and knoweth God." That is the one thing 
that makes life worth while. And all the worlds, 
and all the constellations and all the eternities are 
worthless, where love is not. 



IV 

SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 



IV 

SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 

IN these extremely practical remarks I am 
going to try to tell you who are looking for- 
ward to the business of life some of the things 
I have learned in my business. I am a minister of 
the gospel; that is my business; but I am not go- 
ing to talk about the ministry as a profession, nor 
about the subjects with which the minister deals; 
I am going to bring you some of the lessons of 
life which I have learned in my calling and which 
are applicable to men in all callings. 

I have learned, for one thing, the value of 
punctuality. That was a lesson I had to learn. 
I was somewhat addicted, in my youth, and in 
my early ministry, to dilatoriness. I think that 
I must have belonged to the class which some one 
has described as three-handed people — two hands 
and a little behind-hand. I was often behind 
time in getting to church, and to prayer-meeting, 
and other appointments. I never meant to be, 
but there were always a number of last things to 
do, which had been put off, and the consequence 
was that I was often mortified on getting to 

87 



88 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

church and finding that the congregation had 
been waiting for me perhaps five or ten minutes. 

After a few experiences of this kind I saw that 
this would never do; that my habits in this re- 
spect must be thoroughly reformed, and they 
were reformed. I have learned the importance of 
being on time, and there are few occasions when 
anything is depending on me, upon which I am 
not on time. 

The lesson is worth learning. It Is, indeed, 
a valuable moral lesson. The lack of promptness 
and punctuality is a serious fault. It is a bad 
kind of selfishness. The indolence or careless- 
ness which makes you tardy Is a species of self- 
indulgence, and when others are depending on 
you and waiting for you, you are taking your ease 
at their expense. It is not honest. You are 
robbing them of what may be very valuable. 
If you are a just-minded person, you will not do it. 

Another thing that I have learned Is the value 
of work. If I have made any success in life it has 
been won by steady, patient, unflinching work. 

It isn't due to genius, for I am not a genius; 
nor to luck, for I have had no favors from for- 
tune; nor to station and influence, for I had to 
make my way up from the humblest conditions; 
but simply to the capacity for patient and sus- 
tained industry. 



BO ME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 89 

Doubtless there are some among you who think 
that a man In my calling can know very little about 
what work means. Shortly after I had finished 
my college course, as I was riding one day with a 
farmer of my acquaintance, on his buckboard, 
from the village to my home in the country, 
the farmer asked me v/hether I had got through 
school. I told him that I had finished my college 
course. 

"Goin' to school any more.^" he queried. 

"Not just yet." 

"What are you goin' to do now.?" 

"I expect to work awhile." 

"Work, eh.? What are you goin' to work at.?" 

"I think I shall teach school." 

"Laws! Ye don't call that work, do ye.?" 

Well, I had taught school already enough to 
be able to tell him that, although I had had 
abundant experience of the hardest kinds of work 
on a farm, I had never, in any long summer day's 
work plowing or hoeing corn, or mowing grass or 
cradling oats or rye been so utterly fagged out as 
I had been at the end of some school days. But, 
of course, he could not understand that at all. 

It is true, however, that for a man whose oc- 
cupation is intellectual, the capacity for hard and 
steady work is just as essential as for a man in any 
kind of manual labor. 



90 COMMENCEMEN T DA YS 

The ability to work means just this — ability 
to hold yourself down to your task, whatever 
it may be, till it is done, and thoroughly done. 
For if a man's tasks are Intellectual, there is just 
as much temptation to idleness, or dawdling, or 
desultorlness, as there is if he is working with his 
hands. If a man is studying a difficult subject, 
it is easy to relax his hold upon it and let his mind 
wander off in reverie, or be drawn this way and 
that by all sorts of side issues. If he is writing a 
sermon or an essay, he may get tired of thinking 
it out, and may pick up a newspaper, or a maga- 
zine, or he may take a notion to go down street 
and see somebody; he may even go off driving or 
fishing; there are all sorts of temptations to neg- 
lect the work in hand. And it is true, I fear, that 
in various kinds of intellectual dissipation — in idle- 
ness and gossip and lazy self-indulgence — a good 
many students waste a large portion of their hours. 

Now, if I have had any success in my calling 
it has come from a steadily increasing power 
to hold myself right down to my work; to shut 
out of my mind the solicitations of ease and relaxa- 
tion; to fix my attention on the business in hand 
and stick to it till it Is finished. I have known 
quite a number of men. In my own calling, whose 
failure, or very limited success, has been due to a 
lack of understanding of this great fact. 



SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 91 

I want to say, also, that I have found hard work 
good for the health. My physical vigor, my power 
of endurance, is greater now than it was thirty or 
forty years ago. I am doing more hours work in a 
week and doing it more easily now than in the 
first ten years of my ministry. I believe that 
there is nothing better than the consciousness of 
good work, well done, to keep a man's mind cheer- 
ful and contented; and when your mind is serene, 
your body is much more likely to be in good con- 
dition. 

Another lesson that I have learned is that It 
pays for an employe to do his level best all the 
while for his employer. 

You know, of course, that I have been an 
employe all my life; I have been working in that 
capacity about fifty-five years; I have never 
been in business for myself. My employers for 
most of that time have been corporations, for a 
church, you know, is a corporation. Four years 
of the time my employer was the publisher of a 
great weekly newspaper, of which I was one of the 
editors; the rest of the time I have been in the 
employ of churches. 

So far as the ruling principle of conduct is 
concerned, I do not think that there has been any 
difference between my newspaper work and my 
church work. I tried, I know, while I was work- 



92 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

ing for the newspaper publisher, to do my level 
best every day. For this I had no credit; my 
name never appeared in connection with my 
work; nobody outside of the office knew what or 
how much I did; but I am sure that it was my 
honest purpose to give that publisher every week 
the very best fruits of my best thinking; to do a 
little better work every week than I had done the 
week before. No fault was ever found, so far as 
I know, with the quantity or the quality of my 
work. When I laid it down, it was not because 
my employer wished it, but for reasons of my own. 

It isn't any easier, I want to tell you, to work 
for a corporate employer, like a church, than for 
an individual employer. If you think it is, just 
notice how short the pastorates are in most of the 
churches. Plainly, it isn't easy to suit this many- 
headed employer. Doubtless the ministers some- 
times give up their work because they are not 
satisfied, but the relation is very often termi- 
nated because the church is not satisfied. You 
may think that the minister has it all in his own 
hands, but that is not true. 

"How is your church getting along.?" some 
one asked a good old colored minister. 

*' Church.? I ain't got no church," was the re- 
ply- 

"What's the matter?" 



SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 93 

"O, when I was out of town last week, they 
sent me in my resignation." 

White churches as well as colored churches 
have ways of doing that — more delicate ways, 
but still effectual ways. And it becomes a serious 
practical question for every minister — as it is for 
every other employe — to maintain right relations 
between himself and his employer, relations which 
look to permanence and satisfaction and peace. 

Here, now, I am sure, it has been the constant 
and ruling purpose of my life to do my very best 
for my employer, to render the best service of 
which I am capable; not to spare myself, not to 
shirk work, but to do a little better work every 
year than I did the year before. I believe that 
every employer that I have had will testify that 
this has been my rule of life. This is the doctrine 
that I preach: 

That every man, in every relation of life, instead 
of striving to get as much as he can, should reverse 
that order and give as much as he can for what he 
gets. 

That, as I understand it. Is the Christian law 
of life; I preach it because I cannot find in the 
New Testament anything else to preach, and I 
have tried to practice it. I know that it has 
been my honest purpose, in my work as a minister, 
not to look for soft snaps and easy berths, but 



94 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

to study how I could do more, give more, serve 
more acceptably. I don't boast of this, because, 
as I understand the Gospel, this is the very least 
that a man can do who wants to follow Jesus 
/Christ. 

"I came," said Jesus, "not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister; not to be served, but to 
serve; not to get, but to give;" and the man who 
follows him, even if he follows him a great way 
off, must yet have this before him as the thing he 
means to do. 

When I was a young minister, and a very hum- 
ble and obscure minister, I met one night, on a 
Hudson river boat, a well known pastor of a 
strong church in New York City, whom I knew 
a very little. The great man was quite gracious 
to the neophyte; he sat down by me and talked 
for a little while quite confidentially. Among 
other things, he asked me if I had paid my fare 
on the boat. I told him that I had. 

"Well," he said, "I have the good fortune to 
have a parishioner who has some interest in this 
steamboat company, and he got me a pass. I 
am often able, by making my wants known, to 
get advantages of this sort. It pays to do it. 
You can greatly reduce your expenses in such 
ways. And," he continued in an undertone, 
"I have this piece of advice to give you: Learn 



SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 95 

to accept favors! In your ministry you will 
often find it very profitable." 

I made no reply. He was a great man, and it 
was not for me to challenge his counsel; but my 
answer, under my breath, was very prompt: 
*'Not if I know myself! I'm not in this world 
on that business. Going about, like a Buddhist 
mendicant, with an alms bowl, isn't my task. 
I propose to do as many favors as I can and to 
demand as few." 

This has been the principle on which I have 
dealt with my employers. I have tried to find 
ways of giving them, constantly, more and more 
of my time, of my strength, of my service. And 
I want to testify that it pays. I am not rich, of 
course; no man ever got very rich who followed 
that rule; but I have managed to get a very 
comfortable living, and I have had a good time. 
No man ever had a better. 

My work has been a blessing and a benediction 
to me, from beginning to end. I have had many 
struggles and discouragements, of course; but 
the joy of the work has been all the while an ex- 
ceeding great reward. The kindness, the friend- 
ship which has been my portion wherever I have 
lived have made my life a very happy one. 

Perhaps you think that the minister's case is 
exceptional; that while this rule of life would 



96 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

work in my calling it wouldn't work in yours. 
There are some differences, of course; but not 
radical differences. Churches are made up of 
folks, nothing else. There is a lot of human 
nature in them. They are apt to behave much 
like other employers. 

And I believe, from the bottom of my heart, 
that the rule which I have tried to follow is the 
right rule for every employe to follow in his rela- 
tions with his employer — not to see how much 
he can get out of him and how little he can give 
in return, but how much he can give of loyal, 
hearty, efficient service. 

It is the right thing for every employe of the 
city to do, from the street sweeper up to the 
mayor; and for every employe of the state and 
of the nation. It is the right rule for every man 
who works for another, or has any kind of business 
dealings with another, to give that other just as 
much as he can of service for what he receives. 
It is the Christian rule, I know, and the Christian 
rule must be the right rule. 

We are not, of course, to overwork or injure 
ourselves in this endeavor and thus impair our 
power of service, but we are honestly to strive 
in every relation of life to give to all with whom 
we deal as much as we can in the service which 
they engage us to perform. 



SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 97 

If, instead of trying to get as much as he could 
for himself out of all his dealings with his neigh- 
bors and to give as little as he could in exchange 
therefor, everybody tried to give as much as 
he could, this would surely be a very happy 
world. If everybody followed this rule, this 
earth would be heaven. 

Well, if it is right for everybody it must be 
right for you and me. The fact that other people 
refuse to obey it does not excuse us. 

If heaven ever comes to earth — and it is com- 
ing — it will be when each one of us makes up his 
mind to live the life that everybody ought to 
live, without waiting for anybody. 

This then, young men, I give you as the best 
wisdom I have won in my life work. Some things 
I am not very sure about, but this thing I know. 
I know that this is the right way to live. I know 
that the right thing for every young man to say 
to himself is something like this: 

^^One thing I am resolved upon: I will not he a 
sponge or a parasite. I will give an honest equiva- 
lent for what I get. I want no man^s money for 
which I havenh rendered a full return. 

"/ want no wages that I havenH earned. If I 
work for any man, or any company, or any institu- 
tion, I will render a full, ample, generous service. 
If I work for the city, or the state, or the nation, 



98 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

it shall have my best thought, my best effort, my 
most conscientious and efficient endeavor. 

"No man, no body of men, shall ever be made 
poorer by their dealings with me; if I can give a 
little more than I get every time, in that shall be 
my happiness. The great commonwealth of human 
society shall not be the loser through me. I will 
take good care to put into the common fund more 
than I take out." 

"That young men, is the right life to live. If 
you want to know what true happiness is; if 
you want to find the path that shineth more and 
more unto the perfect day; if you want to see, as 
the shadows lengthen, the evening sky kindling 
with a glory such as the noonday never saw, and 
to feel, as life draws near its end that it has been 
a beautiful thing to live — so beautiful that there 
must be given to life the glory of going on — heed 
this word that I have spoken and walk in this 
way that I have shown you!" 



V 

SHORT CUTS 






SHORT CUTS 




X 



is a privilege which I value that I may say .^■^^^■j.i^yf^ 
to the memhers ■ of this graduating class' "a" ^ • 



few words at the close of their college life, 
and'-their entrance upon larger responsibilities. 
I am not going to try to discuss any large ab- 
stract or philosophic theme; I doubt if you are in 
the mood to listen to such a discussion; but I 
should like to help you, if I could, to get hold of 
an idea which will stay with you as long as you 
live and help you in solving the practical prob- 
lems of life. ^, ,,^ ., 

What I want to speak to you about this meffi^ 
ing is the futility of short cuts to success or 
prosperity; the folly and the sin of trying to get 
something for nothing; the wisdom of paying 
full price for all the goods and gains of life. Here 
is one great principle under several phases: it is 
the law of moral equivalents, it is the principle 
of justice which I am going to commend to you, 
which I wish that you may always honor and 
never evade. 

Taking first the homely figure of the short 



lOI 



I02 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

cut, It Is very Important to remember that there 
is wisdom In the paradox of the ancient proverb, 
The farthest way around Is the nearest way home. 
It Is the converse of this that an old philosopher 
expressed when he said, *'He that hasteth with 
his feet misseth the way." The eager, headlong 
runner easily loses the road. The common ex- 
perience of the race has condensed the same 
thought Into various proverbs: "Haste makes 
waste;" and still more explicitly "The more haste 
the less speed." The same uncontrollable eager- 
ness which pushes us on at a breakneck pace in 
the beaten track leads us also to depart from the 
beaten track In search of more direct paths. 
Short cuts are sought to every goal. The dis- 
position to disregard the lessons of experience, 
to avoid the ways in which prudent men have 
trod, and to strike out for ourselves new routes to 
every object of desire is a trait of human nature 
which Is rather Inordinately developed In this age 
and In this land. Most true It is that a trait 
quite akin to this is the source of invention and 
discovery and the parent of our modern progress; 
every device by which machinery Is Improved Is a 
short cut to production; the spinning jenny and the 
power loom are short cuts of the manufacturers; 
the telegraph and the telephone are short cuts 
of communication; stenography Is the penman's 



1 



SHORT CUTS 103 

short cut; and the marvellous success of these 
devices has helped to fill all our heads with 
schemes for shortening all processes and getting 
at the results of work by more expeditious 
methods. This is really what we are after, most 
of us, — contrivances to save time. The patent 
expert in the story of *'Metzerott Shoemaker," 
explaining to a poor inventor why his new machine 
with many similar ones, didn't succeed, thus 
moralizes: "They save muscle, of course; but you 
see, most of us have muscle, and very few of us 
money. That's about the rights of it, I guess. 
If they'd saved time, now, or money, 'twould 
have been different. . . . Well, don't be discour- 
aged: go home and invent something that is 
cheap to make, and that knocks Father Time 
into the middle of next week — some improvement 
in the telegraph for instance, so a man can hear 
y'esterday how stocks stood day after to-morrow, 
and you'll make a fortune yet." 

It is well, however, to understand that while , 
some processes may be hastened and some roads 
shortened, this method has its limitations. There ; 
are processes which cannot with prudence be ;^ 
abridged. There are roads which, although circui- 
tous and toilsome, are as direct as they can be 
made. Attempts to abbreviate these processes or 
to shorten these roads will always be foolish and 



104 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

sometimes hazardous. The ingestion and the 
digestion of the food necessary for the sustenance 
of the body requires a certain amount of time. 
It is not wise to try to reduce the time. The 
man who swallows his dinner in three minutes 
and expects to have it all assimilated into muscle 
and bone in ten minutes more is not a wise man. 
No invention will ever be made by which these 
processes can be greatly shortened. Nature will 
insist on taking time to do her work. When 
you attempt to hasten her gait she has her own 
revenges. 

So, the growth of most organisms follows its 
own law, and cannot be expedited. It takes, 
ordinarily, from sixteen to twenty years for the 
human body to attain to its full stature: the at- 
tempt to bring it to maturity in six or eight years 
will scarcely be made by intelligent persons. 
There is no short cut to manhood or woman- 
hood. You must wait for the slow processes of 
physical development. You may sing, with 
Jean Ingelow's "Seven Times Two": 

"I wish and I wish that the spring would go faster, 

Nor long summer bide so late, — 
And that I might grow on like the foxglove and aster, 

For some things are ill to wait," — 

but your songs and your longings will not avail. 
Some things do not like to wait, but wait they 



SHORT CUTS 105 

must. Waiting is as truly part of the discipline 
of life as work is, a discipline full of profit to all 
of us. 

In the commonest experiences of life we are con- 
tinually encountering this fact that the attempt 
to shorten processes is foolish and even dangerous. 
That proverb we have quoted about the farthest 
way around epibodies a great deal of homely 
wisdom. I hsiv^ had considerable experience in 
tramping for pleasure through mountainous 
districts, and I have generally found it easier and 
wiser to follow the roads, and to eschew short 
cuts. You discover, from some height, that your 
road is very circuitous,^-that you might by 
striking directly across couhtry save a great deal 
of distance, but if you try it you are almost sure 
to come to grief. The ditches, streams, swamps, 
thickets, through which you musiiorce your way, 
more than offset by their difficulties your gains 
of distance. Those of the party who stick to the 
beaten path are apt to come out ahe^d, in better 
condition. The fact is that the road, almost 
always, represents the results of experiei^ice. The 
engineering by which it was laid out may not 
always be scientific, but it is generally p^-actical 
and sensible. There is good reason why itVollows 
this route, — reason which the traveler who for 
the first time is traversing it may not see, but 



lo6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

which he would see if he took pains to study the 
problem. The presumption always is that it is 
better to stick to the road. 

But while short cuts in our excursions afoot 
are thus seen ;to be generally inadvisable, they 
are manifestly! impossible when we are traveling 
by carriage. Then the road is the only practic- 
able route. Ijt is only where roads exist that 
such iocomotif)n is possible. The road is, in 
most countries, the correlative of the vehicle. 
The one implies the other. The attempt to use 
the vehicle anywhere else except upon the highway 
would be highly inexpedient. The traveler who 
took down the fences and started off across the 
lots to shorten the distance would be considered 
msane. \ 

The more highly organised and complicated our 
methods of lotomotion are, the more necessary 
it is that we stick to the road, circuitous and toil- 
some though it be, and avoid "^11 short cuts. On 
the prairie the! pioneer with his, buckboard may 
venture sometimes to leave the trail and strike 
across the country; but the locomotive engineer 
has no choice: there is only one road for him; he 
must keep on the track. Suppose that the loco- 
motive engineer on the Pennsylvania Railway 
should attempt to take his train from the top of 
the Allegheny mountains straight across to 



SHORT CUTS 107 

Altoon a, — avoid ing, by a short cut, the Horse- / y 

shoe Bend ! _ ^ ''-"^* 

npiipQP i'11nQtr?^w^ ^hnw thfl^ attempts to 
annihilate time and distance are often not merely 
ill-advised and inexpedient but positively rash and 
wicked. There are distances that cannot be re- 
duced, without rushing to destruction. There 
is many and many a short cut which is only 
another name for homicide or suicide. And this 
is even more true of morals than of physics. 
When God says, "This is the way; walk ye in 
it," do you never undertake to find a short cut. 
The way may be long and devious, — but there is 
no other road to happiness. There may be an- 
other way that seems to you pleasanter and 
more direct, but the end thereof are the ways of 
death. 

Let me make two or three plain applications 
of this principle. 

The first is a caution to those who seek to dis- 
pense with the needful discipline and training by 
which they are prepared for usefulness. There 
are a good many callings for which men need 
thorough and careful preparation. Success and 
happiness depend upon it. A certain amount of 
knowledge, of manual skill, of practical experi- 
ence are required for such callings, and there is 
no way in which all these qualifications can be 



Io8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

acquired without taking time, and passing through 
the necessary training. 

The young physician is sometimes tempted to 
take a short cut into his profession. Perhap/he 
is poor and does not feel able to afford the/time 
and the money necessary for the long cojlrse of 
study; perhaps he is sordid, and wanj?s to be 
making money; perhaps he is very philanthropic 
and longs to be actively at work, relieving suf- 
fering; perhaps he\is lazy and do^^ not like to 
study; for some or ^1 of these re^'sons he wants 
to cut his preparatoi*,y studies ^hort and begin 
practicing medicine at once. /But the folly of 
such haste as this is evident .enough to anybody. 
The regular course is aU t6o short, if the time 
be well improved, to gai^^ the knowledge of the 
human body — its functions, its maladies, and 
the natural remedial agents and their action by 
which a man is fitted for such responsible work 
as this. The longet I live the more tremendous 
seem to me the responsibilities which the physi- 
cian assumes. I do not see how any man can 
undertake them, at all, except as a matter of sol- 
emn duty. To follow medicine merely as a means 
of gaining a livelihood, with no benevolent or 
philanthropic motive — seems to me monstrous, 
almost as horrible as it would be to follow the 
ministerial calling in the same way. If the main 



/ 



/ 



SHORT CUTS I 109 

motive were to save life, or to alleviate suffering, 
then I can understand how one might choose this 
calling. I can appreciate the heroism, the self- 
devotion of one who for humanity's sake, for 
love's sake, takes this solemn charge upon his 
soul. But, then I cannot understand how any- 
one should be willing to assume it without fitting 
himself by the most patient and thorough study 
for these momentous duties. A short cut to such 
responsibilities ^(sems to me almost unconceivable. 

With most of the professions the case is much 
the same. I think that a man who takes a short 
cut even to the profession of an architect or a 
civil engineer has but a dim conception of human 
responsibility. WheiX some crushing arch or 
tottering wall buries aSscore of men beneath its 
ruins, or some falling bridge plunges a railway 
train into the abyss, the penalty of such haste is 
duly registered. 

And I must own that I am not very enthusiastic 
over the short cuts by which some of our zealous 
friends propose to send men into the Christian 
ministry. This is not the day for callow preachers 
with a smattering of Scripture and a few scraps 
of philosophy. There never was a time when the 
man of God had greater need to be thoroughly 
furnished for his work. Men are sometimes 
pushed into the ministry with insufficient prep- 



no COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

aration, and are compelled to go on with their 
work as best tkey can; but I never knew a wise 
and strong manVvho had suffered this fate who 
had not all his lif^ deplored it. No matter how 
much preparation the minister may have had, 
the subjects with wn\ch he is called to deal are 
so vast that he C)f ten s^nds appalled before them, 
and wishes that he might have weeks or months 
instead of days for their study. And no wise 
young man, if he can help himself, will greatly 
abridge his preparatory studies for this profes- 
sion. The shrewd remark of President Finney 
to the youth who wanted to skip a year of his 
course at Oberlin is worth remembering, *' What's 
your hurry?" asked the President. *'0, I am 
so anxious to get to work," said the youth; "I 
want to save souls." "Young man," said the 
Doctor, "if the Lord had wanted you to go to 
saving souls a year sooner, he'd have made you 
a year sooner." 

A much more serious error is that of the mul- 
titude who are searching for short cuts to fortune. 
This is, indeed, tl^ie one great fault, the besetting 
sin of our land and'^Hr age. If there is one object 
of desire that is more ri'e^rly universal than any 
other it is probably this— to find some quick 
passage to opulence. Very few indeed of the 
multitude are willing to accumulate a competence 



SHORTCUTS III 

slowly, by steady work and patient saving: the 
craving is for rapid gains, sudden affluence, im- 
mediate success. So many persons by lucky 
ventures of one kind or another, by the unearned 
Increment of land that has quickly risen to 
fabiilpus values in the sudden growth of cities; 
by thesliscovery of minerals; by lucky or rascally 
manlpula^Hmi of the stock or the grain-market; 
by the *'reor^i^nizatIon" of corporations, and the 
monstrous inflaffc^n of capital; by corrupt and 
unprincipled bargaiiN^^with legislatures or city 
councils, or railway man^^^s, have risen almost 
in a day, from penury Ao a'fik.^nce, that the 
imagination of the wh9ie multitimbv^s excited, 
and there are hundre^i^s of thousands wkp are 
burning to go and do likewise. To get rich 
quickly; to discover'the secret of Midas; to go 
from the bottom to the top of the ladder at a 
single bound — this is the one strong craving that 
masters the souls of the multitude. It is by this 
that the gambling propensity is mainly stimu- 
lated; the *' speculators," |or "operators," as they 
euphemistically name themselves, in stock and 
grain, and pork, and oil, — as well as the habitues 
of the faro banks and the purchasers of lottery 
tickets are all hoping that by some fortunate 
venture, some lucky turn, they will mount to 
sudden fortune. And the gambling spirit is 



1 1 2 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

more and more pervading every kind of business. 
The craving for rapid and chance accumula- 
tions, for gains that have not been gathered by 
legitimate enterprise, but have been won by bold 
strokes and masterly combinations, amounts to 
a popular mania. 

"He that maketh haste to be rich," says the 
wise man, "shall not be innocent." The proverb 
has, alas, too abundant verification. The eager- 
ness for sudden gain confuses men's notions of 
right and wrong, and the short cut to fortune 
often leads directly across the lines of integrity. 
God's law and man's law are trampled under foot 
in the headlong pursuit of riches. The restless 
bank cashier, unwilling to wait for the slow accu- 
mulation of a competency by savings from his 
salary, abstracts from the vault the funds of 
the bank to use in speculations, loses them, 
and confesses his crinie either by flight or by 
suicide. "He that hasteth with his feet misseth 
the way," — a fatal miss assuredly. 

The contractor, eager to multiply his gains, 
builds with frail lumber and untempered mortar, 
and the tottering tenement,\burying in its ruins 
a hundred lives, is the witness of his crime. The 
greedy manufacturer, that he ijiay undersell the 
market, forces the wages of his working women 
below starvation point, and the graves in the 



SHORTCUTS 113 

Potters Field and the orphans in the Children's 
Home cry to heaven against his extortion. 

There Is one fact which those who seek to get 
rich suddenly should bear In mind; namely, that 
wealth Is largely, — I will not say wholly, but 
mainly — the fruit of labor. The attempt to 
get possession of wealth, by master strokes, by 
sudden luck, without rendering therefor a fair 
equivalent, is the attempt to get the results of 
labor without giving to labor a just reward. 
That, after all, is about what It reduces to. The 
man who suddenly accumulates vast wealth has 
succeeded In approprlXtIng the fruits of other 
men's labors without rendering to them an ade- 
quate compensation. The wealth that is In his 
possession was produced by\the labor of a great 
multitude. How did he get 'it .^ He got it by 
luck or by trickery, or by robbery — legalized 
robbery of course. He did not "give for it any 
equivalent of goods or services. Therefore those 
who created it cannot have received any adequate 
return for their labor. Is it not plain that he 
who maketh haste to be rich cannot be innocent.? 

All who value their own souls must shun these 
short cuts to fortune. No gains are worth having 
save those which are won by Industry and fru- 
gality and legitimate enterprise. Sudden accumu- 
lations are almost always tainted; most often 



1 14 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 



.f*' 



there is blood upon them; they can give no real 
peace or satisfaction. "An inheritance may 
be gotten hastily at the beginning," says the 
wise man, "but the end thereof shall not be 
blessed." 

The short cut to fortune goes by the way of 
getting much for a little or something for nothing. 
The multitude counts that a brilliant achieve- 
ment. The fashion ofXthe world is to get every- 
thing, if possible, for \ess than cost. That is 
what the world calls a ^ood bargain. Money, 
goods, services, powers, — -^ost of us are figuring 
to get them without rendering a full equivalent 
for them. Some of you haVe been elated, now 
and then, when you , have got^a good mark for a 
recitation or an examination on which you knew 
that you were p.6orly prepared. Does It pay.^* 
Large academlg' credits for small amounts of 
scholarship — a,^e they worth much.'^ Whom have 
you cheated, besides yourselves.^ 

It Is all quite futile. The sense of the Eternal 
Reality will return to us now and then, in spite 
of ourselves. No matter how successfully we 
may have fooled our neighbors, the Eternal 
Righteousness is never fooled and we know it. 
And the man who has gotten for himself great 
wealth by his unscrupulous combinations, by 
his skill and shrewdness in taking advantage of 



SHORT CUTS 



/.. 



\ 



the weaknesses or the necessities of his feflow men, 
and whom the world Is acclaiming Jls a great 
financier, will have hours when he :^I11 think of 
the heart-ache and misery, of the desolated homes 
and broken hearthstones on which his fortunes 
have been reared, and a foretaste will come to 
him of the full cup of remorse which he must 
drain to' its dregs before the penalty of his heart- 
less greed Is fully paid. And the preacher, the 
orator, the popular leader who has made himself 
the Idol of the populacfe by flattering them and 
silencing his own Gpiivictlons — who has raised 
the rafters more th^ once by the utterance of 
sentiments which Me knew to be untrue — must 
have hours when he knows himself to be the 
charlatan that ^c is, and when the plaudits of 
the crowd appear to him but a poor recompense 
for the loss of a good conscience and the sacrifice 
of his self-respect. We who have sought to hood- 
wink the eternal Realities must stand face to 
face with them, forever. We may, for a time, 
impose on our fellow men; but the worst of It is 
that we shall have to live with ourselves for a 
great while, and some of us, I fear, will find our- 
selves poor company. 

There is one other application of this principle « 
to which we may give a few moments. This | 
refers to our efforts to improve society. The ^ 



1 16 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

attempt to secure by methods of force, or by 
legal contrivances, social conditions which can 
only be reached by the slow processes of growth, 
is a mistake which many persons in this genera- 
tion are continually making. To suppose that 
the social life of the nation can be regenerated, 
off hand, either by revolutionary insurrections, 
or by revolutionary legislation, is a prevalent 
error. The Millennium will never be brought in 
by any such magical instantaneous change. The 
social reformer, with his one panacea for all social 
ills, imagines that if he could get the people to 
adopt his measure, poverty and wretchedness, 
vice and crime would at once be banished from 
the land. He thinks that if the Legislature would i 
only give him the legal permission, he could 
mount to the top of the State House dome, and 
wave his wand, and instantly the want, the care, 
the sin of the land would fly away; that old 
shapes of foul disease would disappear, the 
narrowing lust of gold, the thousand wars of old 
would vanish out of sight, and the thousand years 
of peace would begin. No matter what the 
panacea may be: it may be an eight-hour day, 
it may be the Single Tax, it may be constitutional 
prohibition, it may be collectivism, — the visionary 
reformer imagines that the statutory proclama- 
tion of it would put an end to poverty and sorrow. 



SHORTCUTS 117 

I do not say that all those who are In favor of 
such measures entertain such expectations; many 
of them are much more sober; but you very often 
hear remarks which Indicate to you how fan- 
tastic are the hopes entertained by their pro- 
moters. "I cannot help feeling," said a fairly 
intelligent and sensible man In my hearing the 
other day, *'that If all men had free access to 
natural opportunities, poverty would shortly dis- 
appear." It was an honest opinion, and yet how 
baseless! Have we not all seen scores and hun- 
dreds, with the freest access to natural oppor- 
tunities — and all other opportunities, — with the 
very best advantages of all sorts, — with the most 
helpful and stimulating environment, — despising 
all their opportunities, refusing the chances 
offered them, resisting the good influences that 
surround them, squandering their powers of body 
and mind, and sinking Into poverty and degrada- 
tion? Poverty, and wretchedness, vice and crime, 
are not going to be disposed of In a hurry. They 
will be with us for a long while yet. Would to 
God we could get rid of them by some fortunate 
adjustment of laws, and economic methods! But 
that Is not possible, and we may as well face 
the fact. There Is no short cut from this era of 
want and care and sla to the Promised Land of 
Universal Peace and Plenty. 



\^ 



1 1 8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

Some of us, most of us, I suppose, have great 
faith in law. We fondly imagine that if we can 
persuade Congress or the Legislature to say; 
"Be it enacted," so and so, the thing thus speci- 
fied and required would surely come to pass. 
".BuX- the-iaw'm^de-notWftg^-peffeety''' P 
and the saying holds for these. day^ntTTt ess surely 
^an for Paul's. Law never made anything per- 
fect. Law is of use only when it registers and 
confirms certain steps of moral progress that 
have already been taken. Law can never lead 
but must always follow moral reform and social 
reconstruction. 

Many, also, are fain to believe that what law 
cannot do can be done by the sword. Ever since 
Alexander cut the Gordian Knot, rash reformers 
have been assuming that the tough problems of 
the state could be worked out by the last argu- 
ment of kings. But the expectation is vain. 
War settles nothing, except some of the most 
superficial political questions. No social change 
of any magnitude was ever wrought by violence. 
In tha book from which I have quoted already, 
*' Metaerott, Shoemaker," two of the chief charac- 
ters catrry on this: colloquy: 

"Aslto slaveryj do you call the negro question 
a settjed one?" 

"Well, they are legally their own masters, but 




SHORT CUTS 

whether they are better off In essentia] 
open question." 

*'Some day, Dr. Richard s^^yfake up some 
thoughtful history whIcly.^=fou already know- 
pretty thoroughl5\^ an^^^^ad It with this question 
In your mind, 'Is^>^y question ever so decided 
by the sword ^^^to lea'^^ everybody better off all 
round .^' i^n't there always a residuum of evil 
to somebody, — and usually to everybody — caused 
^by the very means used to effect a cure.'"' 

If that question were carefully pondered by 
all classes, I fancy that we should be threatened 
with no more attempts to solve the social ques- 
tion by violence. 

No, my friends, It Is not mainly by legislation, 
It Is not by revolution, that we shall bring In the 
glory of the latter day. These short cuts to the 
promised land will never conduct us thither. 
They are misleading and delusive. He that 
hasteth with his feet. In these paths, misseth the 
way. 

I do not deny that something may be done by 
law to Improve the condition of the laboring 
classes, nor do I deny that compact organization 
and the firm assertion of rights are necessary, 
on their part. All I assert Is that It Is not by the 
methods of destruction and violence, but by 
discussion, agitation, peaceable combination, and 



120 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

political action that the ends they seek will be 
most surely and most speedily reached; and that 
it is far better to go slowly, one step at a time, 
and not a very long step either, than to seek to 
overturn the existing social order and bring in 
the new dispensation in a day or a generation. 

*We cannot force the season by legislative enact- 
ments or by revolutionary outbreaks; any more 
than we can compel the coming of the Spring 
by putting on our summer clothes in February.* 
These great social changes must needs be gradual. 
They are always the fruit of moral changes in 
the lives of the people — of better ideas, purified 
sentiments, elevated aims, regenerated characters. 

' Unless they have their basis on this firm ground 
they do not long endure.* Laziness, selfishness, 
animalism, will always make trouble, a great 
deal of trouble, in the best regulated social order. 
The shirk, the trickster, the thief, the tyrant, 
the man of beastly appetite would be with us 
still, if we could get our improved social schemes 
all happily launched; nor, will the number of 
them be perceptibly lessened by any new arrange- 
ment of the social machinery. We shall find 
them a serious obstruction and a heavy burden, 
beyond a doubt. Let us suppose that Mr. Bel- 
lamy's Utopia were inaugurated by universal 
consent; do you suppose that it would start 



SHORT CUTS 121 

right off in the smooth, frictlonless manner that 
he describes? No: there would be an army of 
shirks who would push for the soft places, — and a 
horde of small politicians who would resort to 
bribery and every sort of venal Influence; and 
the strong would still contrive to crowd the weak 
to the wall; and the mighty host of criminals 
and vagabonds and paupers would still, for the 
most part, persist in their parasitic purpose, and 
would invent schemes of one sort or another by 
which they would manage to live upon the in- 
dustry of their fellow men. Let us not suppose 
that by changing the forms of our social admin- 
istration, we are going to change, radically and 
suddenly, the facts of human nature. 

Yet the truth Is undeniable that "the old order 
changeth, giving place to new." Clear and bright 
upon the page of history stand the record and 
the promise of the progress of the people. We 
know that the movement by which shackles are 
unbound, and burdens are lightened and the way 
of life is made smoother for weary feet Is steadily 
going forward, that no man can hinder It. 

Such, then. Is the substance of the word I desire 
to leave with you. Beware of the short cuts which 
mean the scamping of work and the forcing of the 
vital processes. Don't try to get something for 
nothing or much for little. What concerns you 



122 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

fmost is that every man who deals with you shall 
feel and know that he has got a full and fair rec- 
I ompense for all he has given. 

I The world owes no man a living; all it owes 

^^^-^ - him is a fair chance to get a living. It will give 
you all that chance, I hope, and it will give you 
a great deal more. Every day it will give you 
daily bread, cloud and sunshine, water from the 
brook, flowers or snow-crystals, helpers for your 
tasks in willing winds, and falling waters, and 
electric currents, and kindling flames; tasks for 
your hands that will discipline your wills; friends 
to love; needs to serve; beauty to enjoy; a heaven 
above you to kindle your wonder; paths for your 
thoughts out into the eternities. Freely, freely 
you are receiving the bounty of this wonderful 
world; and you cannot afi"ord in dealing with this 
world, to get something for nothing, or much for 
a little. To the world that gives you life you owe 
love and service. Don't die in debt. Freely ye 
have received; freely give. 



VI 

STUDY AND GROWTH 



VI 
STUDY AND GROWTH 

A GREAT man was once counselling a 
younger friend concerning the work he 
had in hand, and among other things 
he advised him to live a studious life. This 
young man was out in the world; his period of 
pupilage was past; but his counsellor seems to 
urge that his study must go on, that his growth 
depends on it. 

To those who are still in school, or who are 
passing from school to college, it would seem 
hardly necessary to urge this consideration. It 
may be, however, that there are those who need 
to be reminded that as gardening is the main 
business of a gardener, and banking of a banker, 
and mining of a miner, so study is the principal 
and normal business of a student. All this would 
be commonplace. But it may be worth while 
to fix our thoughts for an hour on the relations 
between study and growth, intellectual and 
moral growth, growth of character. 

Physical growth, for the most part, takes care 
of itself. The healthy human body increases in 
125 



126 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

stature and In vigor by processes that are largely 
organic or instinctive. It is true that intelligence, 
directed toward the better understanding of the 
laws of nutrition and of physical culture and of 
hygiene, may facilitate and stimulate growth 
— may enable us to secure symmetry and perfec- 
tion of physical development. To a certain 
extent the laws of physical growth are under our 
control. But savages, who give no attention to 
such matters, often attain to great physical 
power and perfection. Following Instinct and 
appetite their bodies reach maturity and vigor. 
But the growth of the mind does not proceed 
upon these lines. Natural Impulse and instinct 
cannot be depended on to secure its perfection. 
The savage is evidence of this: for while, under 
the operation of simply natural forces, he often 
becomes a splendid animal, he always remains 
a child in Intellect. 

The growth of the mind calls therefore, for the 
right direction and the proper exercise of the 
intellectual powers. It is not a matter which 
can be left to the operation of automatic forces; 
it is a matter which depends upon the attention, 
the choice, the conscious and deliberate coopera- 
tion of the mind Itself. 

I have used the word cooperation; what does 
that signify.? With whom and with what are 



STUDY AND GROWTH 127 

you to cooperate In promoting the growth of 
your own intellectual and moral powers? 

The first and most obvious answer would seem 
to be that you are to cooperate with those who 
are seeking to secure for you this good thing — 
who have set before themselves your highest 
welfare as the object of their choice and are doing 
what they can to promote it. Many of you have 
parents whose concern for you is deep and gen- 
uine, whose happiness is bound up with your 
welfare in ways far more intimate than you are 
able to conceive, and who have no other interest 
in life so dear as that which is involved in the 
development of your minds and hearts. They 
desire to see you becoming men and women in 
the full sense of those great words, and they have 
furnished you with such educational advantages 
as you are now enjoying, perhaps at some sacri- 
fice, because they cherish for you this desire. 
The teachers whose instruction you are enjoying 
are the agents who have been chosen by them 
to do this work for you. It is fair to assume that 
the teachers themselves, although they have 
less personal interest in you, have some clear 
sense of the value to you of the good which your 
parents have chosen for you, and are desirous of 
helping you to realize it. 

What 1 am now suggesting is the wisdom of 



1 28 COMMENCEMENT DA YS 

cooperating heartily with those who are seeking 
the highest development of your manhood and 
womanhood. 

You can have no doubt, I suppose, that, if 
this is the end they have in view, they have 
chosen the best conceivable thing for you. To 
realize yourselves; to become what God meant 
you to be, to "make your calling and election 
sure," — this is the highest thing you can think 
of. So far as the end to be aimed at is concerned 
there can be no difference of opinion between 
yourself and those who have been choosing for 
you. 

But you may be inclined to believe that their 
way of working to secure this end is not the best, 
and therefore you may sometimes find yourself 
out of harmony with some of the plans for you — 
questioning the wisdom of parents and teachers, 
doubting the value of this or that kind of training, 
perhaps disposed to rebel against pupilage alto- 
gether and to feel that you ought to be permitted 
to choose your own way, with little or no sugges- 
tion from anybody. It is just at this point that I 
want to ask you to think soberly. Is it not, 
probably, on the whole, the best thing you can do 
to cooperate heartily with those who are seeking 
your welfare.'* Is it not likely that the regimen 
which they choose for you will be more v/isely 



STUDY AND GROWTH 1 29 

chosen than that which you might choose for 
yourself? They have the experience of many 
generations to guide them; is it not a little safer 
for you to follow the path indicated by experience 
than to strike out a new road for yourself? 

It is, of course, true that neither parents nor 
teachers are infallible, that our systems of educa- 
tion may be in many ways defective; and it is 
therefore possible that there may be something 
better for you than what they have chosen for 
you. But on the other hand it is perhaps safe for 
you to admit that you are not infallible; and 
that the systems and methods which you deem 
defective may be better than any which you could 
devise. It is not at all improbable that what 
you think their defects are their greatest excel- 
lencies and that the things which you wish to 
avoid are the things you most need. 

There are two facts which it is well for you to 
bear in mind in this connection. The first is that 
it is natural for young people, say from fourteen 
or fifteen to twenty-one or twenty-two, to put a 
great deal of emphasis on their individual likes 
and dislikes, — their own ideas, and notions, and 
idiosyncracies, and preferences — and to feel that 
their way, because it is their way, is and must be 
a great deal better than anybody else's way. 
It is the time of life when the human being comes 



I30 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

to a knowledge of himself, and when the sense of 
selfhood is much exaggerated. He is apt to think 
that his feelings, ideas, aptitudes are peculiar to 
himself, that no one can quite understand or 
appreciate him. 

"A common tendency," says a leading psy- 
chologist, "observable — especially in younger per- 
sons who are still in the adolescent stage. . . is 
the sense of estrangement. It is a very frequent 
experience for persons to feel themselves shut off 
from others; to think their individual revelations 
peculiar to themselves: to look upon customs and 
conventions as external to their own experi- 
ences. . . . One young man writes: *I have a 
striking and peculiar experience, and one you 
don't see often'; but an outsider, on reading his 
record in connection with many others, is able to 
find in it nothing that is striking or unusual. 
When twenty-two years of age Kingsley wrote to 
his mother: I am not like common men; I am 
neither cleverer nor wiser nor better than the 
multitude, but utterly different from them in 
heart and mind.' A girl writes, 'I am different 
from other people; I have never been a blind 
follower in thought or deed.' " 

You very often hear this feeling expressed by 
boys and girls in their teens. "Now / am made 
just like ^Au," — you hear them saying; or "It's 



i 



^TUDY AND GROWTH I3 1 

just this way with w^," — their notion evidently 
being that there is something very unusual about 
the way in which they are made; when the 
particulars which they proceed to state about 
themselves show that there Is nothing at all ex- 
ceptional about their mental and moral structure: 
they are, to all human appearance, very much 
like other folks. 

Now do not for one moment Imagine that I 
am ridiculing this state of mind; It is perfectly 
natural for you to think and feel so. "There is," 
says Mr. Dole, "nothing wrong or alarming In this 
self-conscious adolescent stage. . . . The youth 
is learning values, and his own values are the 
first which he learns. Meantime other values 
appear out of perspective." When you first 
begin to get possession of yourselves, you have 
your hands pretty full of yourselves — and your 
head and your heart too. That is neither mar- 
vellous nor censurable, but it results in one of 
the illusions of adolescence. And it Is this feeling 
— that you are a peculiar person, — quite unlike 
others — which makes you sometimes restive under 
discipline; unwilling to accept the regimen pro- 
vided for you; inclined to fly the track and strike 
out a path for yourselves. It is this feeling which 
makes It sometimes difficult for you to cooperate 
with parents and teachers In their plans for your 



132 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

training and development. "All that may be 
well enough for other people,'* you are sometimes 
inclined to say, "but I am not like other people." 
And the fact which I now wish to impress upon 
you is that this is the natural illusion of adoles- 
cence; that you are, after all, very much like 
other people; and that the training which is good 
for other people is probably just what you need. 
I ask you to summon your own common sense 
and take a rational view of this matter; to recog- 
nize the fact that your instinctive feelings in 
these transitional years are not always safe guides. 
The other fact which I should like to have you 
bear in mind is one which you will have to take 
my word for. It is my own observation of the 
results of refusing to cooperate with parents and 
teachers and stick to the regular courses of school 
and college. One learns a good deal in living 
fifty or sixty years among young people and 
v/atching their careers. I have seen a good many 
young men and women fly the track in this way — 
get it into their heads that the methods of 
steady work and thorough discipline might be 
good enough for other people but were not need- 
ful for them, — and I have had a chance to talk 
the matter over with quite a number of them 
ten or twenty or forty years afterward. And if 
you could hear their retrospective testimony 



d 



STUDY AND GROWTH 133 

respecting their own fatal foolishness; if you 
could hear the hard names which they are wont 
to call themselves when they think of the mis- 
take they made in refusing the opportunities of 
education that were offered them, you would 
think several times before repeating their mistake. 

One is apt to find out, after he is fully launched 
into the business of life, how much a good educa- 
tion is worth; but the things which we might have 
had neither bring pence to our purses nor peace 
to our hearts. It does not comfort you much in 
harvest time to know that in seed time you were 
a fool. It will do you no great good, when the 
century is forty years old to look back to its sec- 
ond decade and reflect that your head was then so 
distended with your own conceit that there was 
no room in it for common sense. 

But the cooperation of which I spoke some time 
ago, goes deeper still. It is not alone with parents 
and teachers that you need to cooperate but with 
agencies deeper and diviner, — with forces that 
are at work within your own souls. For this 
period of adolescence through which a good 
many of you are passing — a period which lasts 
from twelve or fourteen till twenty- two or twenty- 
four — is a period in which a good many things, 
some of them very significant, are taking place 
in your lives. A great fermentation and up- 



134 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

heaval is going on then: it is quite apt to be a 
period of storm and stress; and the experience 
of which Paul writes in the seventh chapter of 
the Romans is the experience through which 
you often feel that you are passing, — the law in 
the members is warring against the law of the 
mind; and you can say with Paul: "That which 
I do I know not; for not what I would that do I 
practice, but what I hate that I do. . . . To 
will is present with me, but to do that which is 
good is not." 

This conflict within the soul assumes many 
phases. The psychologist from whom I have 
already quoted, says that many of the phenomena 
of adolescence "center in the disparity which 
exists between . . . the old self and its new possi- 
bilities. Youth is the time of the awakening of 
ideals, a time when there is an intimation of a 
larger life ahead, a fuller life still on the out- 
side. . . . The direct result of this lack of har- 
mony between the two selves is that the power of 
insight and appreciation grows in advance of the 
power of activity. One sees what to do but lacks 
the ability to execute it. . . . The first factor 
in it all is the increased complexity of life which 
comes through the germination of new powers 
and the capacity for new functions. . . . The 
next factor to be emphasized is the seeing but 



STUDY AND GROWTH 135 

not doing — feeling but not responding by some 
adequate activity; having an impulse in a certain 
direction but seeing it deadened by a lack of 
vital energy or through the paralysis of the will 
under opposing motives. . . . Dim, indefinable, 
irrepressible impulses press in on one. They are 
too large and hazy to find definite outlet. The 
person is comparatively helpless in the breach 
between theory and practice; between insight 
and the ability to act; between appreciation and 
the power of execution." 

Such are some of the phenomena of that period 
of mental and spiritual growth through which 
the students of high school and college are pass- 
ing. They are the signs of enlarging life. They 
are the growing pains of the soul. They show 
that the life is moving out into larger relations 
and broader sympathies. 

And this period of growth is a critical period. 
It is a time when the nobler faculties are roused; 
when there are great aspirations and high ideals; 
it is also a time when the passions rage and the 
animal strives for the mastery. "Youth," says 
the writer from whom I am quoting, *' is the point 
of development at which . . . not only geniuses 
begin to develop but also criminals; not only per- 
sons of greatest spiritual insight, but likewise 
those of the extremest sensuality. It is at this 



136 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

point that religious difficulties most frequently 
develop into insanity. It is the point at which 
possibilities open up in every direction. If too 
much let alone, the crystallization which shall 
set the pattern for the whole after life may be 
some excess or fatality quite abnormal. The little 
tottering child learns by experience, but may be 
destroyed in the process of learning. It is of 
the gravest importance to look toward the means 
of steering clear of the developmental tendencies 
when they are liable to become too extreme." 

Now I do not believe that there is any better 
medicine for this kind of disorder than the faith- 
ful performance of some daily task by which the 
intellectual powers are disciplined, the judgment 
trained, and the habits of attention formed. 
Some muscular exercise is good, but mental dis- 
cipline is most essential — some such exercise of 
the intellectual powers as shall enable us to guide 
them whithersoever we will, and to hold them 
to their tasks; the training which shall give us 
the mastery of ourselves. What we want is 
intellectual clarity and steadiness; the power to 
bring our chaotic mental world into unity: and 
there is no better way to gain this than to take 
up some regular course of study and hold our- 
selves to it till it is finished. 

And although this may seem in its earlier 



STUDY AND GROWTH 137 

stages laborious and severe, yet there is apt to 
come to those who are patient and resolute and 
persevering a deliverance from the bondage of 
routine and painful effort into the liberty of 
spontaneous action. In learning new things 
there are often long periods when we seem to 
ourselves to be making no progress; but if we 
persevere, suddenly, some day, almost before we 
know it, we are over the difficulty and find our- 
selves doing easily and naturally what has long 
been done clumsily and painfully. 

I have learned to row, with a free oar, within 
a few years; and that experience is fresh in my 
memory. For a considerable time I labored with 
the oars — to get them into the water simultane- 
ously; not to dip too deeply; to turn the blade 
at the right angle so that it could easily be lifted 
out of the water; to hold it at the right angle 
so that it would feather beautifully, skimming 
the surface of the water on the backward stroke; 
to turn it in the nick of time for the perpendicular 
dip — all this I found it hard to do, and there 
were constant hitches and splashes; it seemed as 
if I would never get the hang of the oars. But 
old oarsmen told me to keep right at it, and 
before I knew it I should find that my wrists had 
unconsciously acquired the right twist, so that 
the action would be automatic. So it happened; 



1 3 8 COMMENCEMEN T DA YS 

the time came when the muscles began to do their 
work without watching, the process required no 
more attention than breathing. 

One investigator who has been studying the 
psychology of telegraphing, found that those 
who were learning to receive messages by ear 
generally started in promisingly, and made con- 
siderable progress for a few weeks, but "just 
before the proficiency required for receiving 
main line messages was reached there is, without 
exception, a plateau in the curve of improvement 
extending through several weeks, — a long period 
*when the student can feel no improvement and 
when objective tests show little or none.' Then 
follows a sudden rise in the curve. 'Suddenly 
within a few days, the change comes and the 
senseless clatter becomes intelligible speech.'" 
^f Something like this is in store for a good many 
\\^ of you, if you will hold yourselves steadily to 
■"^^ tasks in which you often seem to yourselves to 
be making no progress. 

" Sudden the worst turns the best to the brave." 
The difficulties of any subject which you are 
studying are apt to clear up all at once if you 
hold yourself to it without wavering or flinching. 
And so it is with the whole great problem of life, 
which often looms before you vast, portentous, 
insoluble. Just as you get the mastery of the 



STUDY AND GROWTH 139 

lesser tasks, and find them turning to pleasures, 
so you may hope to get the conscious mastery 
of life as a whole, and the light and joy which 
come with that assurance. There will never be 
a day without conflict and toil and struggle; but 
there may come to you a day when there will be 
peace in the heart and the knowledge that the 
world is under your feet; that you are conquerors 
and more than conquerors. 

But all this depends on a firm and unwavering 
fidelity every day to the duty in hand. Such 
mastery and glory do not come to those who 
scuttle and run when days are dark or tasks are 
dull; they are the portion only of those who have 
patience to stand fast and endure and overcome. 
Only for such is the crown of life waiting. 

The growth of the human soul is a marvellous 
thing: one who has lived long enough to watch 
the process in many lives has found in it a peren- 
nial source of interest and wonder. The gradual 
unfolding of the intellectual faculties, the gradual 
clearing up of the ideals, the steady maturing 
of power and purpose — how inspiring it is! Nor 
is it a rare phenomenon. How many have I 
known In a pastorate of fifty-five years, who have 
come up from childish Immaturity to vigorous 
manhood and splendid womanhood — passing 
through the storm and stress of adolescence, 



140 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

holding fast their standards, keeping faith with- 
their better selves, and finally coming out into 
the open with God's clear sky over their heads 
and the world and the flesh and the devil under 
their feet. Some of them are here before me; 
some of them are in other cities, in other lands; 
it is good to think of them and to feel sure that 
wherever they are they are standing firm in their 
integrity and doing well their work. We often 
recount the failures we have known; perhaps we 
are wont to dwell too much upon these: it is well 
now and then to call the roll of those who have 
fought the good fight and won it: who have out- 
grown their crudities and chastened their conceit, 
and brought to heel their passions and learned 
to rule their spirits with reason and good will. 
A great cloud of such witnesses there is, in the 
skies above and in the earth beneath, who are 
waiting to-night to testify that for you, too, if 
you will choose it and lay hold upon it, there is 
the right and the power to receive the fullness of 
life and to enter into the liberty of the glory of 
the children of God. 



VII 
BOOKS AND READING 



VII 
BOOKS AND READING 

OF Books and Reading what could one 
hope to say In half an hour? Nothing 
adequate: It Is picking up a few pebbles 
on the shore of a measureless ocean. Yet one 
may pick up pebbles to some purpose; Demos- 
thenes did, we are told, and Sir Isaac Newton 
must have thought of doing It, else we should 
not have had the simile, Itself as well-worn as 
the pebbles. One who loves books and who 
loves young folks likes to bring the two together. 

Perhaps books have been to some of you mainly 
taskmasters, of late: I want you to make them 
friends. You can have no better company in the 
days now before you. 

Of books and reading, I am set to speak and 
chiefly of the reading of books. There Is a great 
deal of reading which has nothing to do with 
books. The Americans are said to be a reading 
people, but booksellers all over the land are testi- 
fying that the number of books sold Is much less, 
in proportion to the population, than It was 
twenty-five or fifty years ago. I have been told 
143 



144 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

that more books were sold In Columbus, when 
it was a city of thirty or forty thousand than are 
sold to-day when it boasts of two hundred thou- 
sand. One reason for this is the growth of li- 
braries; another and more important reason is 
the multiplication of newspapers and magazines. 
If we could represent graphically, after the 
fashion of the time, the newspaper reader as 
compared with the book-reader — or at any rate, 
the time given to newspaper reading by all readers 
as compared with the time given to book reading 
by all readers, — we should have, I dare say, a co- 
lossus not less than six fathoms high for our news- 
paper reader, and a pigmy whose stature was not 
more than a handbreadth for our book-reader. 

I am not inveighing against newspaper read- 
ing; it is part of the business of life; no man can 
be a good citizen who wholly neglects it. For 
certain needful information we have nowhere 
else to go. If nothing beyond this needful in- 
formation were there, the newspaper might 
afford intellectual and moral profit; as it is, one 
does not expect to win culture or character by 
exercising his faculties in this field. We must 
make no sweeping statements about newspapers; 
we must recognize the fact that they are not all 
alike, and that some of them are conducted on 
a much higher plane than others; but the effect 



BOOKS AND READING 145 

of newspaper reading as a whole upon the in- 
tellect, the taste, the imagination of the people is 
far from salutary. "It is not," says one essay- 
ist, "the function of the newspapers to minister 
to the intellect or the imagination in any high 
sense." This must, I suppose, be confessed. 
For the training of the mind, for the cultivation 
of the judgment, for the purification of the ideals, 
we must find some other kind of reading than 
that which the average newspaper furnishes. 
In truth, the effect upon the intellect of the news- 
paper habit is to disable it for the reading of 
good literature. It is just because we Americans 
read newspapers so much that we are losing our 
power to enjoy good books. The man who 
likes the stunning head-line and the shrieky 
rhetoric, and the sensational exposure of all life's 
vulgarities, cannot possibly find any pleasure in 
what is properly known as literature. Those 
who feed voraciously six days in the week upon 
diet of this kind and give the greater part of 
Sunday to a pile of this provender which is not 
only in quantity more formidable but in quality 
more debased than that of the week-days, will 
never buy good books and read them. It is not 
only time that is wasted in stuffing the mind 
with the details of crime and the trivialities of 
gossip and the spun out inanities of what is called 



146 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

news, but the powers of the mind itself are en- 
feebled by such a mental habit. 

The first word of counsel for young readers is, 
then, that they learn to read the newspaper 
rapidly, and cursorily. You must read it, you 
cannot neglect it, but you can get through with 
it speedily. A little practice will enable you to 
tell at a glance whether the page has anything 
worth spending your time upon. A good way 
to read the articles with the staring head-lines 
is to begin near the bottom, for it is often the case 
that what is brazenly asserted in the caption is 
denied in the last paragraph. Fifteen or twenty 
minutes will generally put a swift reader in pos- 
session of all that is of real importance to him 
in a newspaper. Sometimes he will light upon 
something to which he will give more time, but 
not often. And those who resolutely practice 
such a method as this may save a great deal of 
time for the reading of good books. 

The magazines are no doubt answerable for a 
large amount of the diminution in the sale of 
books: and the magazines are, as a class, of a 
much higher rank than the newspapers. Yet 
the magazine is a business enterprise: it must 
sell — that is the first consideration; and naturally 
it strikes at timely topics, and seeks to swim with 
the current of the popular thought. It possesses, 



BOOKS AND READING I47 

therefore, a strong flavor of contemporaneity: 
it does not cultivate in us the habit of taking 
wide and calm views of life. Mr. Arlo Bates pro- 
nounces this judgment: 

*'The genuinely cultivated reader finds in the 
monthlies many papers which he looks through 
as he looks through the newspaper, for the sake 
of information, and less often he comes upon 
imaginative work. The serials which are worth 
reading at all are worthy of being read as a whole, 
and not in the distorted and distorting fashion 
of so many words a month, according to the size 
of the page of a particular periodical. Reading 
a serial is like plucking a rose petal by petal, the 
whole of the flower may be gathered but its 
condition is little likely to be satisfactory. While 
the magazines, moreover, are not to be looked 
to for a great deal of literature of lasting value, 
they not only encourage the habit of reading in- 
dlff"erent imitations, but they foster a dangerous 
and demoralizing inability to fasten the attention 
for any length of time. The magazine mind is 
a thing of shreds and patches at best: incapable 
of grasping as a whole any extended work. Liter- 
ature holds the mirror up to nature, but the 
magazine is apt to show the world through a 
toy multiplying glass which gives to the mind a 
hundred minute and distorted images." 



148 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

This judgment needs to be qualified, for some 
of the best literature is constantly appearing in 
the magazines; nevertheless it is true that much 
of it is fragmentary and ephemeral: and that the 
mind which gets all its supplies from periodical 
literature will not be a very well-equipped mind. 

I am pleading, then, for books: I desire to get 
your assent to my contention that books are 
far better worth knowing than magazines or 
newspapers. That there are multitudes of worth- 
less and mischievous books I am not denying; 
you will be called to exercise a most careful 
discrimination when you deal with them; but I 
am calling your attention to the fact that the 
great literature of the world is not, chiefly, that 
which is appearing daily, weekly, and monthly 
in current periodical literature, but must be 
largely that which has been produced in past 
years or centuries; and this is preserved for us 
only in books. To shut ourselves up to the prod- 
uct of the day Is to doom ourselves to a hopeless 
provinciality and narrowness of thought. How 
much of this one encounters, in his daily contact 
with men! How many there are who have ab- 
solutely no outlook upon life, who are utterly 
cabinned, cribbed, confined within the influences 
of the present, to whom the generations of the 
past, with their stores of experience, are as though 



BOOKS AND READING I49 

they had never been! How often one hears 
judgments expressed, with all the arrogance of 
ignorance, which a little more familiarity with 
what men have been thinking and saying in the 
past would have greatly modified. Yet even of 
the literature of the present, we may safely say 
that that which succeeds in getting itself within 
covers is apt to be a little better considered, and 
a little more worthy of serious attention than 
that which is to be used to kindle your fire with 
before it is twenty-four hours old. Many of 
the books of the present are ephemeral, no doubt; 
but some that are well worth knowing are ap- 
pearing in every decade; it is our misfortune if 
we fail to get acquainted with them. Between 
new books and old we must hold the scales 
evenly: the man who never reads a new book is 
as far from wisdom as the man who never reads 
an old one. There is this to say, however, that 
there is some presumption in favor of a book 
which has lived for a generation or a century 
or a millennium. I am not at all sure that nat- 
ural selection in this case works unerringly, 
that it is always the fittest which survive; yet it 
is, no doubt, the general rule, and that is one 
reason why one turns with a little more confi- 
dence to what are known as the classics of our 
literature. That word is often misused; it is 



I50 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

sometimes applied to books which are yet damp 
from the press. Perhaps a definition may be 
serviceable, and this is Arlo Bates's: 

"A classic is more than a book which has been 
preserved. It must have been approved. It is 
a work which has received the suffrages of genera- 
tions. Out of the innumerable books, of the 
making of which there was no end even so long 
ago as the time of Solomon, some few have been 
by the general voice of the world chosen as worthy 
of preservation. There are certain writings which, 
amid all the multitudinous distractions of prac- 
tical life, amid all the changes of custom, belief 
and taste, have continuously pleased and moved 
mankind, and to these we give the name Classics." 

Not all of these, however strict may be our 
limitation, can any of us hope to know; but we 
may know some of the best of them. The writer 
whom I have just quoted names five of the greater 
classics, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Homer, 
and the Bible. With each of these every fairly 
intelligent person ought to be tolerably familiar. 
Homer and Dante must be read by most of us 
as we read the Bible, in translations; but there 
are good translations; for a few dimes you may 
possess yourself of either of these classics. To 
enjoy Chaucer you would need to do a little 
study in some handbook of Early English, but 



BOOKS AND READING 151 

that study would well repay your labor. Shake- 
speare, with excellent explanatory notes Is easily 
accessible, and he, beyond all the rest thus far 
named is the poet of humanity. Matthew Arnold's 
noble sonnet does not over-estimate his greatness: 

Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
We ask and ask, — thou smilest and art still, 
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill 
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, 

Planting his stedfast footsteps in the sea, 
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling place, 
Spares but the cloudy border of his base 
To the foil'd searching of mortality; 

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, 
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honor'd, self-secure, 
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. — Better so! 

All pains the immortal spirit must endure, 

All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow 

Find their sole speech in that victorious brow. 

Of the Bible as literature much has been said of 
late, but I have found in a book on the study of 
literature which I have been reading during 
the past week (and from which I have been 
quoting), a passage which I will read to you: 

"If it were asked which of the classics a man 
absolutely must know to attain to a language of 



152 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

literature even respectable, the answer undoubt- 
edly would be, 'The Bible and Shakespeare.' He 
must be familiar in the sense in which we use the 
word in the phrase 'mine own familiar friend in 
whom I trusted' — with the greatest plays of 
Shakespeare, and with the finer portions of the 
Scriptures. I do not of course mean all of the 
Bible. Nobody, no matter how devout, can be 
expected to find imaginative stimulus in strings 
of genealogies such as that which begins the 
Book of Chronicles, or in the minute details of 
the Jewish ceremonial law. I mean the simple 
directness of Genesis and Exodus; the straight- 
forward sincerity of Judges and Joshua; the 
sweetness and beauty of Ruth and Esther; the 
passionately idealized sensuousness of Canticles; 
the shrewdly pathetic wisdom of Ecclesiastes; the 
splendidly imaginative ecstasies of Isaiah; the 
uplift of the Psalms; the tender virility of 
the Gospels; the spiritual dithyrambics of the 
Apocalypse. No reader less dull than a clod can 
remain unreverent and unthrilled in the presence 
of that magnificent poem which one hesitates to 
say is surpassed by either Homer or Dante, the 
Book of Job. The student of literature may be 
of any religion or of no religion, but he must 
realize, and realize by intimate acquaintance, 
that, taken as a whole, the Bible is the most 



BOOKS AND READING 1 53 

virile, the most Idiomatic, the most Imaginative 
prose work in the language." 

I have found, also, during this week. In one of 
the magazines for November an article on the 
Bible as Literature, in which the writer asserts 
that "the Bible Is the one book that no Intelli- 
gent person, who wishes to come into sympathetic 
touch with the world of thought, and to share 
the Ideas of the great minds of the Christian era, 
can afford to be Ignorant of." All this may serve 
to indicate that some sense of the value of this 
book as the instrument of culture Is beginning to 
get possession of the public mind. Yet the Ig- 
norance of this book which prevails even among 
the young people of our Christian families Is 
deplorable. It Is high time that parents and 
Sunday School teachers and all other teachers 
were bestirring themselves to put an end to con- 
ditions so shameful. But there are, probably, a 
good many young people before me who would 
be compelled, if their knowledge were tested, to 
confess that they know very little about this 
book. It Is not necessary that they should be 
ignorant. You can buy a copy of It for twenty 
or twenty-five cents, — (though most of you could 
well afford a better one) — and you can find 
many opportunities of studying It, under good 
instructors. 



154 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

Besides these greater classics are many other 
English books with which you may hope to be- 
come familiar. None of us can read any more 
than a small proportion of the best books; but 
all of us may extend our acquaintance among 
them, if we have the will to do so and will make 
the most of our opportunities. I cannot be very 
specific in counsels covering so large a field; but 
one or two bits of suggestion are submitted to 
your judgment: 

I. So far as you are able read your own books. 
The public library is a great convenience, as is 
the hotel and the restaurant; but as some of us 
prefer, for the most part, to sleep in our own 
beds and eat at our own tables, so we greatly 
prefer to read our own books. Generally speak- 
ing, a book that is worth reading is worth owning. 
We must not push this dictum too far; there are 
many whose hunger for books can only be satis- 
fied by the library, because they are not able to 
buy for themselves. Still it is far better, when 
we can, to have our books about us, as permanent 
companions. The single reading does not exhaust 
a valuable book, any more than a single conver- 
sation exhausts the friendship of a valuable friend. 
We want to return to it many times; we want to 
become thoroughly familiar with it. To know a 
few good books in this way is far better than to 



BOOKS AND READING 1 55 

have a nodding acquaintance with a multitude. 
Many of the young people who listen to me are 
saying that they cannot afford to buy books. 
How many of them afford several dollars a month 
for dope or cigarettes, and how many of them can 
afford to go every week or two to the theater.? 
I am not saying that money spent for all these 
purposes Is all wasted, but I am sure that those 
who are able to afford so much money for such 
things could, if they would, begin even now to 
lay the foundations of a library. I am sometimes 
a good deal surprised to find well-to-do people — 
even those who like to read — buying books very 
infrequently: they seem to put them into the 
category of scarcely allowable luxuries. Not so; 
books are among the necessaries of life to those 
who know what life means. "When I get a little 
money," said Hugo Grotius, "I buy books. If 
I have any left I buy food and clothes." That 
is hyperbole, but it is an approximation to the 
truth. 

2. Read the great books carefully. Some of 
the lesser ones you may skim; but the more 
precious and authoritative ones should not be 
treated in that way. You must con them, weigh 
them, consider them. On this Ruskin's counsel 
in " Sesame and Lilies " is excellent. Read all that 
he says about it. "You must get yourself into 



156 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

the habit," he says, "of looking intensely at 
words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, 
syllable by syllable, letter by letter. . . . You 
might read all the books in the British Museum 
(if you could live long enough) and remain an 
utterly * illiterate' uneducated person, but if you 
read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, 
that is to say with real accuracy, you are forever- 
more in some measure an educated person." 

3. Choose your books as you choose your com- 
panions, with a clear view of what they are able 
to do for that which is best in your nature. Do 
not read a book, if you can help it, which lowers 
your standards of virtue or honor, which loosens 
your grip upon the realities of daily life; which 
makes you moody or dreamy, or pessimistic. 
Choose the books which widen your horizon, 
brace your manhood, confirm your highest pur- 
poses; and which, if they uncover for you the 
evils of life, nerve you to resist and overcome 
them. 

4. Within the boundaries of sanity and de- 
cency cultivate a catholic taste. You ought to 
be able to appreciate and enjoy more than one 
kind of books; you ought to be able to see that 
as there are many men of many minds, so then 
must be many books of many kinds. Of cours 
the effect of a wide knowledge of literature is to 



BOOKS AND READING 157 

cultivate this catholicity; the thorough going 
dogmatist in literature, the man who wants to 
set up his dictum as decisive, and to anathematize 
what he disHkes is one who has not, probably, 
read very widely and who, probably, never will. 
I remember well a Sophomore in college who, on 
my first meeting with him, found me reading 
"Dombey and Son," and who launched forth 
into a sweeping condemnation of Dickens as a 
silly, stupid, brainless writer: he couldn't see 
how anybody could waste his time on him. I 
answered him not a word but I made up my 
mind about him, that day, and I never had rea- 
son to change it. That is a very good story of 
Thackeray and Carlyle, at a dinner of the Royal 
Academy, where the talk turned upon Titian. 
"'One fact about Titian,' a painter said, 'is his 
glorious coloring.' 'And his glorious drawing is 
another fact about Titian, ' put in a second. Then 
one added one thing in praise and another another, 
until Carlyle interrupted them to say with 
egotistic emphasis and deliberation: 'And here 
sit I, a man made in the image of God, who 
knows nothing about Titian, and who cares 
nothing about Titian; — and that's another fact 
about Titian.' But Thackeray, who was sipping 
his claret and listening, paused and bowed gravely 
to his fellow guest. ' Pardon me,' he said, ' that 



IS8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS ^ 

is not a fact about Titian. It is a fact — and a 
very lamentable fact— about Thomas Carlyle.'" 
Let us not attempt to make our ignorance the 
arbiter of other people's tastes. 

If you should ask me now to name for you, 
in three minutes, three of the chief gains to be 
gotten from good books I should answer, first, 
in the phrase of Barrett Wendell: "It is only in 
books that one can travel in time." A book is a 
swift conveyance that will transport you, in a 
moment, into the heart of far away centuries, 
and enable you to live, for a while, in the minds 
of people long dead; to understand what ideals 
charmed them and what passions moved them; 
to compare their life with ours and measure the 
progress which the race has made. 

Secondly, the great books help us in getting 
insight into life — other people's lives and our own 
lives too; in getting acquainted with ourselves. 
"Studies of the Soul," is the title of one of the 
best of my new books. Most of the greatest 
books are studies of the soul, and they aid us 
greatly in acquiring the knowledge which Socrates 
insisted was the most important of all knowledge 
— the knowledge of ourselves. "Knowledge 
without self-honesty," says one, "is as a torch 
without flame; yet of all the moral graces self- 
honesty is perhaps the most difficult to acqujre. 



BOOKS AND READING 159 

In its acquirement is literature of the highest 
value. A man can become acquainted with his 
spiritual face as with his bodily countenance 
only by its reflection. Literature is the mirror 
in which the soul learns to recognize its own 
lineaments." For this purpose fiction of the 
highest grade is most serviceable. That fiction 
is to many of those who are listening to me a 
savor of death unto death I do most sadly fear. 
I presume that there are some scores of persons 
in this audience whose only chance of possessing 
a sound and vigorous mind lies in their absolutely 
ceasing to read fiction and beginning at once a 
course of mental training by which they may 
recover from the debilitation which a steady 
diet of novels has wrought. All this is truth 
which needs to be spoken often, and with deep 
seriousness, in the ears of young Americans. Yet 
it remains true that for those who have not 
abused their minds by these enervating excesses, 
for those who still have enough mental grip and 
power of attention to read serious books and 
find pleasure in them, the higher fiction may 
often be a most useful means of education, in 
clearing up their insights, in revealing to them 
the secret springs of conduct, in helping them to 
understand themselves, and to interpret human 
life. 



l6o COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

And, finally, good books serve us greatly by 
recreating in us the life of the spirit, the life of 
the intellect, hy strengthening what Paul calls 
the law of the mind, in its fight with the law of 
the members, the grovelling tendencies. All the 
higher motives and incentives are constantly 
drugged and dulled by the materialism that 
surrounds us like a cloud; the atmosphere of the 
mart and the shop and the street stifles our 
heroism, our hope, our disinterestedness, and 
stimulates our greed, our cunning, our animalism. 
If we would save our souls we must often get 
out of this mirk and mire to better air and firmer 
footing. And the great books — best of all the 
great poetry — lift us up, and set us on a rock and 
put a new song into our mouths. We see Childe 
Roland setting his slug-horn to his lips and blowing 
his defiance to the Dark Tower; we read the mag- 
nificent faith of "Prospice" and *'Abt Vogler;" 
we listen to Whittier's glorious "Psalm;" or to 
Holmes's "Chambered Nautilus" or to Lowell's 
immortal * Commemoration Ode," and our hearts 
are stronger for the struggle of life. We begin to 
see that man does not live by bread alone but 
by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
of God. We know that things which eye sees 
not and ear hears not are the true necessaries of 
life. 



BOOKS AND READING l6l 

In good books the great souls of all the ages 
have left for you their legacy of faith and inspira- 
tion. Do not miss your inheritance. Choose 
wisely among them. The best are as accessible 
as the worst. If you keep bad company among 
books it is because you prefer it; the noblest 
offer themselves to you quite as cordially as the 
meanest. 

Finally, brethren, whatsoever books are true, 
whatsoever books are honorable, whatsoever 
books are pure, whatsoever books are lovely, 
whatsoever books are of good report, if there 
be among books any virtue and any that are 
worthy of praise, read these books. 



VIII 
WHAT FOR? 



VIII 
WHAT FOR? 

WHAT am I living for? 
Let us come to close quarters with 
this question of questions. Let us face 
it, like men and women, without flinching. If 
we have no coherent purpose in life, if we are 
only drifting, let us know that. If we are waver- 
ing between diverse and irreconcilable aims, let 
us know that. If we have ideals, objects, ends 
of any sort in view let us know what they are. 

The question of the final cause — the *'what 
for?" — is deeply human. Children with wakeful 
minds are always asking it, sometimes to our 
embarrassment. "Grandfather, what is that calf 
standing there for?" was a question put to me 
as we drove past a pasture. It went beyond my 
depth. The persistent inquiry is the witness to 
the teleological tendency of the human mind, — 
the instinctive disposition to assume that a pur- 
pose underlies all life; that everything is for some- 
thing. We are all living: How many of us know 
what we are living for? We begin life in a sublime 
unconsciousness of separate existence. The little 
i6s 



l66 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

child does not make the metaphysical distinction 
between the *' me " and the " not me; " for a good 
while after he begins to talk he speaks of himself 
in the third person; 

"The baby new to earth and sky, 
What time his tender palm is pressed 
Against the arches of the breast, 

Has never thought that 'this is I;' 

"But as he grows he gathers much, 
And learns the use of *I,' and *me,* 
And finds, *I am not what I see 

And other than the things I touch;' 

"So rounds he to a separate mind. 

From whence clear memory may begin, 
As through the frame that binds him in, 
His isolation grows defined." 

"The state of babyhood," says Mr. Dole, "is 
the state of the young animal. There is a suc- 
cession of sensations, pains, pleasures, passions, 
desires, like so many colored beads strung to- 
gether on a thread. The only unity at first is 
that made by the string of memory upon which 
the beads are threaded; but this is not real or 
constructive unity. There is no freedom in the 
young child, who is moved from within and with- 
out by a variety of compelling causes, visible 
and invisible. He uses will, but it is like a blind 
force. It is not free will." 



WHAT FOR? . 167 

But by and by the sense of his separateness 
dawns, and becomes the dominant fact of his 
experience. During the earlier period of adoles- 
cence the youth is quite sufficiently conscious 
of himself. This seems to be a necessary stage 
in human development. The individual has 
his rights and dignities and it is needful that 
these should be understood. 

So long as this mood of mind prevails the ques- 
tion we are considering to-night is not likely to 
be usefully considered. The tendency of the 
human being at this period is not to ask what he 
is made for, but rather to assume that all the 
world is made for him. 

This is, or ought to be, however, a rudimentary 
stage in the development of the human being. 
I fear that a great many persons — perhaps the 
great majority — never outgrow it. Most of us 
remain more or less under the dominion of the 
egotistic illusions, and keep assuming that the 
world revolves around us. If this is the state of 
mind, the study of the problem of life will not be 
profitable. But one hopes to come across, here 
and there, ingenuous young men and women who 
are, in part at least, free from these egotistic 
illusions: who are beginning to be aware that no 
man liveth unto himself; that the completion and 
perfection of life are found in its relations. I 



l68 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

know that there are young men and women who 
are capable of comprehending the seriousness of 
life, its great opportunities, its heavy responsi- 
bilities, for I have met some of them, and have 
heard from their own lips the confession of their 
earnest wish to find the goal of life. 

The question before us is not the question of 
occupation or calling; that Is simply a means to 
an end: what we are thinking of now is the end. 
What is the controlling conception of the good of 
life, which marshalls our energies and directs our 
endeavors .? 

Let us hear the answers which some of you are 
making to this question of questions. Your day 
dreams, your night visions — the pictures that you 
make for yourself of life's consummation and 
crown — let us throw them upon the screen and 
contemplate them. 

You hope — some of you — to possess a vigorous 
and healthy body, a well-developed physique, a 
comely and attractive personality. Some of 
you put a good deal of stress on this: To be a 
great athlete would fill this ambition of some 
young men that I have known; to be a great 
beauty would satisfy the deepest desires of some 
young < women. But these can hardly be con- 
sidered as objects of life. Get vigor, young men, 
and with all your gettings get muscular efficiency, 



WHAT FOR ? 169 

but what are you going to do with It after you 
have got it? The body at Its best Is but the In- 
strument of the soul; the soul Is the man. An 
athlete with whom athleticism has become the 
end of existence Is a kind of Incarnate non seq- 
uitur. 

Beauty, also, in a woman is a good gift of God, 
— but it performs its true ministry only when it 
Is an unconscious possession. When it is coveted 
and counted on, when It Is regarded as a personal 
asset, and paraded as a personal distinction It 
becomes unsightly and profane. The career of 
a "professional" beauty is one of degradation. 
It is clear that life cannot find Its end In bodily 
perfection of any sort. 

But some of you are hoping to possess well- 
stored and well-disciplined minds. You have 
a passion for culture. As many as possible of 
the things worth knowing you want to know; 
with the best that is In books you desire to be 
familiar; you have some conception of the power 
that knowledge gives and you desire to wield it; 
you crave the mastery of languages, so that the 
literature of many tongues may offer you its 
treasures. There is wealth of the highest sort 
here which you covet, and you are ready to give 
time and toil to gain It. 

Or it may be that science has touched you 



170 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

with its fascinating spell; you have followed the 
patient students who have been interrogating 
nature and compelling her to yield up her secrets, 
and you have caught their enthusiasm and desire 
to add to the store of scientific knowledge which 
they are gathering. 

All this is high employment, stimulating and 
inspiring occupation for the mind: but is this 
the end of life? Do we live to know? Is not 
knowledge, as well as physical strength, an in- 
strument rather than an end ? What are you going 
to do with your knowledge, when you have got 
it? 

Some among you will be quite ready to reply 
to this challenge. You are not in any danger of 
valuing knowledge as an end in itself: of its in- 
strumental character you are fully persuaded — 
too fully persuaded, it may be. You have never 
thought of making it the final cause of existence; 
you have sought it only as a means to an end — 
perhaps to an end that was inferior. You mean 
to use it for ulterior purposes. And you are 
saying to yourselves, in your day dreams, "With 
the equipment which I am getting, whether it 
be culture or scientific training, — whether I get 
it in the classical college or the technical school, 
or the commercial academy, I will seek and 
make my fortune. It is to this that all my train- 



WHAT FOR? 171 

ing, whether physical or mental, Is tributary. 
I am to have a career In this world; an industrial 
career or a business career, or a professional 
career; and what I am living for Is to make that 
a successful career." 

"My fortune! My career!" These are the 
words about which thought is wont to gather, 
and toward which the streams of wishes and 
aspirations are apt to flow. To make a fortune 
or to have a career, are the controlling purposes 
of life. And the central Idea of each of these 
conceptions Is apt to be that of the magnet which 
draws to itself and attaches to Itself the sub- 
stances over which it has power. Here is the 
world, round about me, full of material goods, — 
gold and silver, houses and lands, furniture and 
equipage; full of Immaterial goods also — honor, 
station, social position. Influence, distinction — 
which a man may gain and enjoy; how much of 
all this can I attract to myself .f* This Is the com- 
mon way of stating the problem of life. Not all 
want the same things. Some want money and 
material good more than anything else; with the 
vast majority this is the dominating motive. 
When they speak of fortune it is in this lowest 
and narrowest sense that they use the word. 
Others care more for professional success, and 
others for literary and artistic distinction, and 



172 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

Others for political power and others for social 
rank and eminence; but with all those whose 
attitude of mind I am now describing the central 
question is how large a contribution they can 
get the world to make, whether of material or 
immaterial goods, for their use and enjoyment. 
To get the currents of wealth or fame or influence 
or popularity flowing toward them; to get out 
of this vast and multifarious store of benefits 
which the world holds, as much as they can, 
perhaps as much as they lawfully can, for them- 
selves, — this is, substantially, what they are 
living for. 

Let us suppose that you get all this. Let us 
suppose that you whose aim is the accumulation 
of wealth succeed in your ambition, — that you 
get the competency or the affluence you are 
dreaming of; that you get for yourself a beautiful 
home with all comforts and adornments and 
income enough to maintain it handsomely; 
enough to let you travel where you will and gather 
the harvest of eye and ear from fields of beauty 
and halls of song; enough to command for your- 
self the services of waiting men and waiting 
women; to surround yourself with all that can 
minister to your own ease and enjoyment, — 
when that is won, will you have secured for 
yourself that which is best worth living for? 



WHAT FOR? 173 

Are you satisfied now to look forward to that as 
the goal of life, and to bend your energies to the 
attainment of that; to feel that when that is yours 
the prize of life is won? 

Or let us suppose that it is professional life to 
which your thought is directed, and that you 
succeed in winning a high place in your profes- 
sion, — so that your services are in demand, and 
you are able to select your own practice, and 
collect such fees as seem to the novitiates in 
your calling little less than miraculous; so that 
deference and honor shall be paid to you wherever 
you go, and the young men shall look up to you, 
and the old men shall be gracious to you, and you 
shall be able to add to your distinction abundance, 
and to your influence comfort and luxury, — 
so that the best things which the world has to 
give shall be yours for a wish. When all this is 
yours, will you feel that it is enough? If you 
could be certain of getting all this do you think 
now that you would be satisfied? Are you ready 
now to make this the end of your striving — the 
main thing to live for? 

Or suppose that it is a literary career or an 
artistic career on which you are setting out. And 
suppose that you can succeed in achieving great 
success — what the world acknowledges as great 
success, so that your books sell by the ten thou- 



174 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

sand, and your contributions are wanted by all 
the magazines; or so that your pictures are in 
great demand, and bring astonishing prices; or 
so that you can charge the cost of a king's ransom 
for playing one or two numbers, or singing one 
or two songs on a concert program, — so that 
you are famous all over the earth, and the crowned 
heads command you to perform for their benefit, 
and multitudes throng to do you honor, — when 
you have won all this, will it be all you want? 
To get for yourself such fame and praise and 
recognition as this — is it enough? Does it content 
you now to think that you may be able, by and 
by, to get the world to give you about all that 
you demand of it, — to lay its plaudits and its 
treasures at your feet? If you could have all 
that, would you feel that it was worth living for? 
These are not the lower and baser ambitions 
which I have conceived you as cherishing. I have 
not questioned your purpose of winning these 
things honestly: I am only trying to help you 
set before yourselves, in clear light, the kind of 
ultimate good you are aiming at, the prize of 
life as you dream of it, and I ask you whether it 
is really to these things and such as these that 
you are now ready to give your lives; whether 
you now think that your lives would be successful, 
if you should gain all this, — and nothing more. 



WHAT FOR? 175 

I hope that before now some doubt may have 
begun to Insinuate itself into the mind of every 
one of you, whether these aims are large enough, 
— whether in getting all this you really come to 
your own. 

For you will observe that the kind of success 
of which I have spoken is the success of the 
magnet which draws everything to itself. I have 
helped you to conceive of your lives as powerful 
magnets drawing to you abundant tribute of 
wealth and honor and personal satisfaction; 
I think that I have done some of you no serious 
wrong in representing this as your habitual way 
of thinking about your future. But is this the 
normal thought about life.? It is the common 
thought, I fear, but is it the right way, the ra- 
tional way of thinking about \tt No; not of life. 
For this process which you have conceived of 
as going forward in your life, the process by 
which everything comes into your life, — by which 
your life becomes a reservoir into which all the 
world's contributory currents are flowing — this, 
if you will reflect, is not the manner of living 
things. It is the way of the magnet; it is not the 
way of life. The magnet attracts to itself all 
with which it has relations; the currents of force 
flow toward it. The living thing has commerce 
with the world in giving as well as in receiving. 



1/6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

The tree gathers contributions from the earth 
and the air, not merely to attach them to itself, 
but to transform them and give them forth again 
refined and transfigured; so that the world is 
enriched by its existence. The tree has the 
power of taking to itself the salts of the soil and 
the nectar of the dew and the energy of the sun- 
shine, and in its laboratory of life recombining 
them into the graceful branch, the leafy canopy, 
the fragrant bloom, the luscious fruit, ministering 
grateful shade and enlivening beauty and re- 
freshing sustenance to man. The tree that 
gathered all these elements into itself and gave 
nothing forth could not be thought of as ful- 
filling its destiny. No living thing completes its 
life in this way. If you want to find analogy 
and warrant for such a career as that which you 
are meditating, you must descend from the 
kingdom of life to the inorganic realm. 

The trouble with your scheme of life is that 
it is unnatural. It is not life. You have been 
told, perhaps, that it is not the Christian life, — 
or that it is not the religious life; but that is an 
inadequate way of putting it; it is not life at all. 
It is a travesty, a caricature, a mutilation of life. 
The life that is life indeed does not follow any 
such law, in any of its kingdoms. 

The tree has given us a hint; let us see what 



WHAT FOR? 177 

It signifies. Surely none of us wishes to live a 
life Inferior In its ruling principle to the life of 
the tree. 

The tree stands in Its environment, In the con- 
stant attitude of receptivity. Its life is open on 
every side to ministering Influences. The mois- 
ture in the mould Irrigates Its roots and fills Its 
veins with nourishing elements: the atmosphere 
bathes it with stimulating life, the sunshine pours 
down upon it the enkindling vigor of the realms 
above. There are no barriers between the tree 
and the environing powers which wait to re- 
plenish its life. It never behaves as If It were 
suflliclent unto Itself. It does not try to live a 
self-centered life. It accepts the fact of its 
constant dependence upon the elements In which 
it has Its being. You might say of It that every 
moment of its life is an unconscious prayer. It 
is because It always maintains, In its environ- 
ment, this attitude of receptivity. Imploring the 
gifts and blessings of earth and air and sky that 
its life abounds, and it Is able to Impart so abun- 
dantly Its own precious and peculiar benefits. 
Because it so freely receives It no less freely gives. 

Can it be possible that the human life has an 
environment any less friendly than that of the 
tree, or one with which It Is by its nature less 
closely related.'* Are there not round about the 



178 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

life of man, his higher life, his thoughts, his affec- 
tions, his will, ministering influences as close and 
stimulating and helpful as those which surround 
the plant? Is there sunshine and dew and the 
breath of life for the lower kinds and nothing 
like this for the invigoration of the higher kinds? 
Shall the tree pray always for more life and fuller, 
and have its prayer answered momently, while 
man stands under the infinite heavens, sullen, 
self-contained, unpraising, prayerless? No, it is 
certain that for that which is highest in man, 
for the life of his spirit, the provision cannot be 
less abundant or less accessible than that which is 
made for the life of the lower orders; and that 
there can be no good reason why the soul of man 
should not be in as close and constant relation 
to the ministering powers as is the unconscious 
tree. And it is certain that we are not living, in 
any true or real sense, unless we are as constantly 
receptive of the light and truth and love of the 
infinite Spirit, as the tree is of the elemental 
influences that minister to its life. 

Let me press this truth upon your thought, 
for it Is really the one truth that no man can 
wisely ignore, though so many men seem to be 
utterly oblivious of it. "God is round about 
us," as really, as closely, as constantly as the 
air and light are round about the growing plant. 



WHAT FOR? 179 

He is pressing in upon our spirits by every avenue 
of thought and feeling; He is waiting to minister 
to us of His abundant fullness, to do for us all 
the while just what its environment does for the 
tree. And what is He, whom we call God, the 
infinite Spirit who thus surrounds our spirits 
with His life-giving influences, — who Himself 
constitutes the environment in the midst of which 
we live and move and have our being? What is 
the nature of this all encompassing divine Life? 
It is truth, it is purity, above all it is love, in- 
finite good will, infinite beneficence, the power 
that scatters benefit and blessing on every hand, 
that maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the 
good and sendeth his rain upon the just and 
upon the unjust; the Providence that always 
seeks to crown our lives with lovingkindness! 
Suppose that He comes into our lives, shedding 
abroad therein all the awakening and life-giving 
energies of His love; suppose that we make this 
divine Love as welcome in our thought and pur- 
pose as the tree makes the dew and the sunlight, 
what will be the eflfect of it, what will the nature 
of our lives be after that? Do you think that 
the scheme of your thought, the strain of your 
life will any longer be summed up in gathering 
in, heaping up, hoarding, levying tribute upon 
the labor and the love and the loyalty of men. 



l8o COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

getting for yourself possessions, reputation, fame, 
distinction, power? No; I think that after you 
have opened free communication between your 
own life and its true spiritual environment, so 
that the divine energies shall steadily flow into 
your souls, your scheme of life will greatly change. 
Some new conception of what it means to live 
will take possession of your souls. 

You will be done, for one thing, with anxiety 
and worry, with the fret and the fever of greed 
and ambition, with the pushing and pulling of 
the eager competitions of the world; your heart 
will be at rest in the assurance that all things 
shall work together for good to them that love 
God. 

And then you will feel, you must feel, the 
throb and thrill of a great redemptive purpose 
within you — of a life that finds its fulfilment in 
service and sacrifice, in reaching out the helping 
hand, in wiping away the mourner's tear, in 
making glad the wilderness and the solitary place 
and in sowing the earth with light and gladness. 

Here is something worth living for. There is 
an uplift and an elation and a glory in this kind 
of life which no man can know so long as the 
instinct of an absorbent is the main motive of 
his conduct. When the youth gets this concep- 
tion, — when his spirit is once fully "oriented," — 



WHAT FOR? I8l 

so that the tides of the spirit flow into his soul 
with blessing and flow forth in bounty, then, as 
Mr. Dole has said, "he awakes to see that he is 
not here to lead a tiny separate life, but that he 
belongs to the universe. . . . His life answers 
back to the promptings of the life of the universe, 
and begins to exhibit the likeness of God. When 
once this change of attitude toward the larger 
and higher life has taken place in him ... we 
may say that it is well with him. He can now 
be trusted and depended upon; he will fit his 
place in the organic body of society. He has 
become a helper and friend of men; his life now 
assumes unity and takes on its proper beauty 
and character. There are many temptations 
from which he is henceforth clear. How, for 
example, can a man who really believes in a 
divine universe, do a deliberate injustice or stoop 
to a career of selfishness? . . . Let us agree 
that no youth is educated till . . . Good Will 
altogether possesses him, uses all his powers, 
and makes him its happy instrument. What 
else is a man for.? What higher life can he pos- 
sess.? . . . Here is that of which all the poets 
and prophets have sung. Here is that which 
all the saints and heroes have practiced. It is 
offered to-day as the crown of youth. Why 
should youth defer putting on its joyous crown? 



l82 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

Why should men lead feeble, restless, crippled 
lives? Hear Robert Browning, the poet of real 
personality. Is it not splendid truth that he 
sings ? 

'For life, with all it holds of joy and woe, 

And hope and fear, — believe the aged friend — ■ 

Is just the chance o' the prize of learning love, 

How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is; 

And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost 

Such prize despite the envy of the world, 

And having gained truth, keep truth; that is all!' " 



IX 

GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 



IX 
GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 

TIIS is the end of the matter; all hath been 
heard; fear God and keep His command- 
ments, for this is the whole duty of man." 
These words are part of the conclusion of that 
remarkable book of Wisdom, put into the mouth 
of Solomon by some late writer, — in which as 
preacher, moralist, philosopher, critic and cynic 
he discourses widely of human problems and 
experiences, sometimes with insight and courage, 
sometimes in a querulous and despairing tone, 
mingling shrewd comments with dubious ques- 
tionings, and periodically coming round to the 
melancholy conclusion that "all is vanity and a 
striving after wind." It is rather difficult to get 
the net result of his estimates; sometimes he 
speaks with the accent of a clear conviction that 
God's in his heaven and that all's right with the 
world; sometimes he bears us down to earth with 
the dead weight of a dismal pessimism. But 
here at the end he comes out of the clouds into 
the open sky with a positive word, which we 
may take as his own summing up of the account. 
i8s 



1 86 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

"The end of the matter!" he cries abruptly. 
"All hath been heard," no more words are needed. 
"Fear God and keep his commandments, for this 
is the whole duty of man." Duty you will ob- 
serve is in italic type in your Bibles; showing that 
it has been supplied by the translators: if we 
leave it out we get a larger meaning; it is the 
whole of man — not only his whole duty, his 
whole reward also, his whole happiness, his whole 
life. Only we must give to this word "fear" 
the larger meaning which it has gained for itself. 
Doubtless it meant originally to be afraid of 
God; that was the attitude in which men stood 
before their deities. They were afraid of them 
and they hated them; their whole religious aim 
was to outwit their gods and so escape their 
cruelties. But long before this Ecclesiast's day 
men had learned to believe in the benevolence of 
their God, and to trust in Him whose kindness 
endureth forever; and while they kept on using 
the old word fear they put into it a new meaning; 
they meant by it a loving and trusting reverence; 
the attitude of the filial child before a wise and 
benignant father. It is in this attitude before 
the Infinite Goodness and in the obedience which 
such an attitude inspires that the Ecclesiast 
finds the sum of human good. It is all well, he 
says, with the man whose thought turns rever- 



GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 187 

ently and obediently to God; whose deepest wish 
is to do God's will. 

It is a familiar, simple, commonplace saying; 
the greater part of the meaning of life is in the 
truisms which everybody admits, but which 
most of us habitualfy disregard. I should like 
to use it as a starting-point for our thought; 
perhaps also it may prove to be our goal. 

I have been spending a considerable portion 
of my time for the last few weeks in the academic 
groves; I have seen long processions of graduates 
in caps and gowns filing past; I have been listening 
to the merry songs of the students, touched now 
and then with a tender pathos; I have watched 
the commencement pageant with some deepen- 
ing of the emotion which such scenes have always 
excited in me. They have never seemed to me 
quite so serious, quite so meaningful as they have 
seemed this year. For this there may be per- 
sonal reasons. It gives you something of a turn 
to see your first grandchild walking off with a 
bachelor's degree, especially if she is a girl; that 
is a vista through which you have never before 
looked down from the commencement stage and 
it has a scenery of its own. In all the other 
colleges I have found my heart with the grand- 
fathers and the grandmothers; I was sharing 
their point of view. The third generation brings 



l88 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

a new bloom to the commencement roses and a 
new light to the landscape. 

But the real reason of the deepening interest 
is not personal. It is rather a sense of the growing 
criticalness of our common life; of the increasing 
importance of the personal and practical prob- 
lems which confront these graduates as they 
go out to find their tasks; of the uncertainties 
and perils and struggles by which they will soon 
be environed. 

I compare, in my own thought, the social con- 
ditions surrounding me when I finished my col- 
lege course and went out into the world, fifty-one 
years ago, with those which surround the young 
men and women who are going out to-day. It 
was a very different world; a world in which 
everything was settled and stable; what the open- 
ings were for young men; what the probabilities 
were, we knew pretty well; one could lay out 
his course and feel tolerably sure of keeping on 
in it; the field of enterprise was full of promising 
opportunities; there was little apprehension of 
any serious social changes. True, a great civil 
conflict was approaching; within two years the 
warrior with confused noises and garments rolled 
in blood would be stalking over the land; but of 
all this there was still no hint in those halcyon 
days. All was peaceful, settled, orderly; there 



GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 1 89 

were political issues, of course, but nobody sup- 
posed that they would disturb the industries of 
the land or produce any dislocation of Its smoothly 
running social mechanism. 

In these days things are very different; the 
air is tremulous with portents of social change; 
the standing order Is challenged at every turn; 
the possibilities of old things passing away and 
all things becoming new are agitating all our 
hearts. Who can tell what questions these young 
people, now going out to the serious business 
of life, will have to meet; in what turbulent cur- 
rents they will soon be sailing; through what 
conflict and struggle they will soon be called to 
pass. One who has any sense of the pressure of 
social atmosphere, — one who feels In his bones 
the things that are coming to pass, — can hardly 
contemplate, without solicitude, the possibilities 
of the future. One finds, however. In what he 
sees and hears in these commencement days, 
some reassuring suggestions and reflections. 

The first Is the volume of the contribution 
which the colleges and universities are pouring 
into the life of the commonwealth. I have not 
taken pains to look up the figures, but I am sure 
that I cannot be wrong In my impression that 
the number of graduates from our higher insti- 
tutions of learning is increasing faster than the 



I9t> COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

population. Surely the number of students in 
the colleges and the universities is growing much 
faster than the population is growing. The great 
state universities, particularly, are all enlarging 
their membership at a splendid rate; and a small 
army of young men and women is going out from 
them this year into the active life of the nation. 
Now I am far from believing that a college educa- 
tion Is always and necessarily a guarantee of 
good citizenship; a man or a woman may get 
through college with low ideals and deficient 
moral sense, and may turn out to be a malefactor. 
But that Is not the rule. We may admit that 
our colleges might do better work than they do, 
in the sphere of character building, but the 
fact is that what they do is, in the great ma- 
jority of cases, something very valuable. The 
young men and women who come out of our 
colleges and universities have, in most cases, 
an equipment for work, and a stock of ideals 
which enable them to render efficient public 
service. I have watched this contribution which 
our higher schools are making to the life of the 
nation now for more than half a century; I have 
traced the influence of these college men and 
women, as they have taken their part in civil 
and national affairs, and while I have sometimes 
regretted that they did not count for more, I 



GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 191 

have oftener been filled with gratitude and hope 
to see them taking hold intelligently and courage- 
ously of the tasks nearest their hands, and giving 
large reinforcement to all the better elements of 
the national life. The fact that the percentage 
of such helpers is increasing is a strong reason 
for encouragement. I do not believe that such 
men and women are often found in the ranks 
of the grafters or the bribers; and they are apt 
to be protected, by the ideals which they have 
learned to cherish, from many of the sordid and 
mercenary influences with which our public life 
is infested. 

Moreover, I think I cannot be mistaken In 
my judgment that the young men and women 
who have been emerging from these colleges, 
during more recent years, evince a keener interest 
in public questions, and a stronger grasp on 
social forces than was true of those who were 
graduated a quarter of a century ago. In all 
the higher institutions, the interest in the vital 
problems of society has been deepening. It is 
probably true that sociology and its cognate 
studies receive four times as much attention in 
our colleges generally as they did twenty-five 
years ago. Where the elective system prevails 
the courses dealing with these questions are apt 
to be among the most popular courses. The 



192 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

result is that our young men and women come 
out of college in these days with their hearts 
well kindled with social passion; with consider- 
able definite scientific knowledge of the problems 
that now press for solution, and with an earnest 
purpose to have a hand in working them out. 

I listened, the other day, to the graduating 
addresses of the six young women whom Vassar 
College selected to represent the class on Com- 
mencement Day; and three of the six were devoted 
to questions of a sociological character. What 
was more important was the spirit in which these 
addresses were conceived. It was evident that 
these college girls had been trained to see, and 
to see clearly, the things that were going on in 
the common life about them, and to feel, and to 
feel intensely, the human significance of these 
things. One would risk little in saying that 
those girls will have something definite and im- 
portant to do with the social life of the com- 
munities where they live. 

Last Sunday morning I sat in a grove, a silent 
listener to the prayers and testimonies of another 
group of girls, in their last college prayer meeting; 
and what struck me was the note of consecration, 
the outlook, the vision, the spirit of altruism, 
which found expression in all these words. They 
had caught the spirit of the Master, *'I am among 



GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 193 

you as one that serveth." The burden of every 
heart seemed to be, *'What can I do to help?" 
Religion, as these girls had learned it, was fol- 
lowing Him who went about doing good. I could 
not help contrasting the spirit of this meeting 
with the spirit of the college meetings which I 
used to attend, where we were all so deeply 
interested about getting saved ourselves. It 
was clear that a finer type of religion is getting 
possession of human hearts. 

These, then, are the reassuring prospects and 
hopes that I bring back from my pilgrimage 
among the colleges. I have spoken of the testi- 
mony of the young women, but I do not think 
that the young men are less responsive to-day 
to the high calling of God. And while we have 
before us some serious problems, my faith is 
strengthened that these young men and women 
are going to give us strong help in solving them. 

I am speaking to some of these who have com- 
pleted their courses in the colleges or in the 
High Schools, and who are not going any further 
at present along scholastic lines. I wish that 
I could convey to them something of the sense 
of expectation and confidence with which the 
thoughtful people of the land are regarding them. 
We believe that the force which they are con- 
tributing to our national life will have much to 



194 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

do in shaping the destinies of the nation. We 
think that there ought to be among them men 
and women who will help to give coherence and 
direction to the moral and social passion which 
has been enkindled during the last decade. For 
surely we find ourselves, in the words of Mr. Ray 
Stannard Baker, "in the midst of a vast and 
chaotic, but profoundly fundamental outburst of 
moral enthusiasm . . . more like a religious 
revival than anything seen In this country in 
many years." And the remark of the same 
writer is equally true, that "mere moral en- 
thusiasm never of itself gets anywhere. It must 
be boiled down to its insoluble residue of hard, 
cold, clear, intellectual propositions. New def- 
initions must be struck out; the leader, with a 
sort of divine carelessness must announce his 
course and play his part." From some of you 
we may expect such service as this: you will 
help us to crystallize the seething criticism and 
aspiration of the time into practical rules of 
living. 

Let me make three simple suggestions which 
can claim no novelty. 

I. I hope that the graduates now entering upon 
the business of life will put themselves into close 
relations with the organized local community — 
with the city or the village or the countryside 



GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES I95 

in which they find their home. I will speak 
chiefly of the city because these remarks are 
mainly intended for home consumption; though 
what I have to say may be easily applied to those 
whose homes are in the smaller populations. 

I trust that these graduates will interest them- 
selves immediately and actively in the life of the 
local community. Our most vital problems are 
to be worked out here. To make the life of the 
city more healthful, more pleasant, more attrac- 
tive, more interesting, more stimulating to the 
better nature of all citizens, more free from 
moral and social contagion, more neighborly 
and friendly; to lighten the economic burdens, 
for those now heavily laden, and to put within 
the reach of all at the lowest possible cost the 
benefit of the great co-operations; to study the 
conditions of those who are under the discipline 
of the laws and those who are the objects of the 
local philanthropies, that all these hapless people 
may be dealt with sanely and helpfully — all this 
is business in which I want to enlist the active 
interest and co-operation of the young men and 
women who are just entering upon practical life. 
I am sure that I do not speak to unresponsive 
hearts. The young people who are lately out of 
school and college have manifested their Interest 
in these matters in an unmistakable way. A 



196 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

good share of the work of this kind which is being 
done in this city is in the hands of our younger 
graduates. These local voluntary philanthropies 
have varied aims and purposes; there are many 
ways in which you can help to improve human 
conditions in the city; you cannot take part 
in all of them; select those which most strongly 
appeal to you and put your strength into them. 

On one feature of this social work let me put 
emphasis — it is that whose aim is to make the 
city more neighborly, — to bring the people of 
all the classes into more friendly relations. Such 
, is the principal design of the social settlements 
[and the social centers; it is not charity, in the 
I ordinary sense; the less there can be of this 
Iquality in it the better; it is friendliness that it 
seeks to promote; to get to know our neighbors 
better and to learn to co-operate with them for 
the common good. In the furtherance of this 
purpose the school extension movement is most 
significant and most promising; if the school- 
houses, which belong to the people, can really 
become social centers, and if the men and women 
living in the district, rich and poor, learned and 
ignorant can be brought together to study neigh- 
borhood problems and social and civic problems, 
we shall get our democracy upon a basis upon 
which there may be some promise of permanence. 



I 



GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 1 97 

It must not be overlooked, however, that all 
this work for the betterment of city conditions 
largely depends on better city government. Bad 
or inefficient government can more than neu- 
tralize all that can be done by voluntary agencies 
for the improvement of municipal conditions. 
And you must have not only a good executive, 
you must have a good council; you must have a 
government that will work together. It is doubt- 
ful whether under the conditions that now prevail 
in most of our municipalities you can get good 
and efficient government without a considerable 
simplification of the governmental machinery. 
The average voter is overloaded with responsi- 
bility. The burden placed upon him is heavier 
than he can bear. He is required to select some 
scores of city officials; to determine upon the 
qualifications and adaptations of a great many 
different men, in regard to positions of whose 
work and demands he knows and can know very 
little. To put such a large responsibility of selec- 
tion upon the average voter is simply absurd. 
He cannot Intelligently discharge It. As a matter 
of fact he never tries to discharge it intelligently. 
He votes, at the primary and at the polls, for the 
candidates which his party managers place before 
him; in nine cases out of ten he has no opinion, 
nor any right to an opinion upon the qualifications 



198 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

of the candidates for whom he votes. Is this 
democracy? It is a bad counterfeit of democracy. 
We shall never have real government by the 
people until we bring the task of the voter some- 
where near his capacity. That is one of the things 
that you will help to do^. Get ready, I beseech 
you, to put your best gains of knowledge and 
trained faculty into the business of giving to the 
city where you live honest and efficient govern- 
ment. 

^ 2. The second of the suggestions I thought 
to make is so comprehensive in its reach that 
I will content myself with merely mentioning 
it. It is that you give to national affairs the 
same conscientious attention that you bestow on 
municipal aifairs. The great problems of our 
national life press upon the minds and the hearts 
of all thoughtful men and women; the nation 
■ will need, in the next decade, the best wisdom of 
all its citizens. You college men and women 
ought to be specially equipped to deal with these 
problems: you know something of history and 
political science; the experience of the world in 
handling such matters is not wholly unknown 
to you; you should be able to furnish some intelli- 
gent leadership to those who are trying to find 
the solution of these questions. What is more, 
the training which you have received has in most 



GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 199 

cases largely been given you by the common- 
wealth, with the intent and the understanding 
that you should use it for the benefit of the com- 
monwealth. Upon you, therefore, the educated 
men and women of the nation, the obligation 
lies heavily to devote your best powers to such 
service of the nation as it may be within your 
reach to give. 

3. The other suggestion is less obvious. You 
will not be able to escape some sense of responsi- 
bility for the service of the city and the service of 
the nation; but when I place before you the 
service of the church as one of your obligations 
some of you will be less inclined to assent. I desire, 
however, to secure from all of you some fair con- 
sideration of this claim. A good many of you are 
now communicants in the church; and some of 
you are loyal and efficient helpers of its work. 
To such there is no need of anything more than 
a word of grateful recognition of valuable service. 
There are others who were brought up in the 
church, and who were in close sympathy with it 
before they went to college but who have appar- 
ently come to feel less interest in its work, and 
who may, perhaps, be questioning with themselves 
whether they cannot find better uses for their 
time and energy than in the fellowships and the 
activities to which the church invites them. And 



200 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

there are others who, though they have always 
held the church in high respect, have never been 
identified with it and are not now seriously think- 
ing of it as one of the agencies which they could 
use in working for human welfare. 

Upon both these last classes I should like to 
urge some fair consideration of the claims of the 
Christian church. You young men and women 
coming out of college into the arena of the world's 
work, want to put your energies where they will 
do the most good. Consider whether the church 
does not offer you an opportunity which you can- 
not afford to disregard. 

There are churches and churches; I am well 
aware that there may be those with which you 
could not happily co-operate. But are there not 
some with whose aims and ideals you would 
find yourself in substantial agreement.? Few 
people ever attach themselves to any organization 
with whose principles and practices they are in 
absolute harmony; always there are points at 
which our assent hesitates, and tendencies which 
we would rather change. More or less of conces- 
sion is always necessary when two or more per- 
sons make up their minds to live and work to- 
gether. But most of you could find some Christian 
church with whose beliefs and ideals you were 
so far agreed that you could, without intellectual 



.^ J 



GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 201 

dishonesty, connect yourself with it and co- 
operate in its work. And there are two or three 
considerations, which may incline you to do so. 

In the first place it is well to remember that the 
church is not an ephemeral institution; it has been 
here a good many centuries, it is here to stay, 
and whatever can be done to improve it and make 
it more efficient is work that promises permanent 
returns. 

In the second place the Christian church is 
the natural generator and magazine of the 
social forces by the aid of which society is to be 
renovated. There is no doubt about this. It 
is historically true that the altruistic and ethical 
and philanthropic movements which have re- 
moved so many of the evils of society, and have 
done so much to uplift and bless mankind, have 
their source and spring in the teachings and the 
life of Him who is owned and followed by Chris- 
tians as their Lord and Master. The institution 
whose bond of union is loyalty to him, and which 
has kept alive in the world the knowledge of Him, 
has some claims on all who love their fellow men. 

In the third place the church is, by eminence, 
the institute of religion. Its business in the world 
is to keep the thought of God alive in human 
experience. Its central function is worship. It 
brings men together, week by week, that they 



202 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

may listen to words which God has inspired; 
that they may lift up their voices in songs of 
praise and penitence to him; that they may join 
their hearts and their voices in prayer to him. 
If these services of the church are what they ought 
to be they help to awaken and to strengthen in 
men's hearts the sense of the presence of God, 
the reality of communion with him, the assur- 
ance of his active interest in all our human con- 
cerns. 

There was a time when God was a tremendous 
reality in the life of this nation; when the great 
majority of the people believed in him. Within 
the last quarter of a century, the sense of his 
presence has grown dim. The world has been 
so noisy that his voice was not heard; the smoke 
of our furnaces has obscured the heavens. It 
begins to be plain, even to the man in the street, 
that things go ill without him. It begins to be 
credible that religion is the vital fact and the 
central force in human life; and that a scheme of 
life which ignores or subordinates it Is sure to 
come to grief. And there are many, who have 
not hitherto banked heavily on spiritual Inter- 
ests, who are now listening when the wise man 
says: "This is the end of the matter: Fear God 
and keep his commandments, for this Is the whole 
of man." 



GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 203 

It is to be hoped that the young men and women 
who hear this admonition will heed it. Neither 
the nation nor any of its citizens can afford to 
leave out of their account the fact of God. He 
is the greatest fact in any man's life: to be ob- 
livious of him is a melancholy impoverishment 
of human experience. You will need, in all your 
warfare against the evil, in all your struggle to 
realize the good, to have the sense of his presence 
alive in your hearts; and therefore, if for no other 
reason, it is well to frequent the places where, 
by the acts of worship which he has appointed, 
men unite their hearts to bring him near and 
make real to themselves his friendship. 



X 

LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 



X 

LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 

THERE was a man of the olden time who 
professed great humility, and I do not 
think that he was a hypocrite; I believe 
that he was a humble-spirited man. Yet I find 
this man writing to those whom he was trying to 
teach, "Be ye followers of me." 

Is not this a daring challenge.? Most modest 
men are loth to assert themselves, after this 
fashion. We rather deprecate the idea of setting 
up as models. "Don't look at me," we are wont 
to say: "Don't take me for a sample. I cannot 
claim to be worthy of imitation!" But Paul 
bids his Corinthian converts imitate him. He 
repeats this call several times in his epistles. He 
is not afraid to tell them, after he has gone away 
from them, to remember his conduct and follow 
it. Is this a mark of egotism.? I do not think so. 
I have no doubt that Paul lived among them a 
life which was really exemplary, a life which it 
would be safe for them to take as a pattern. 
It is doubtless possible for all of us to live in such 
a way that we could confidently call on those 
207 



208 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

over whom we ought to have influence to follow 
our example. In all other departments of life 
such counsel is freely given by experts to ne- 
ophytes. The teacher of music, the teacher of 
drawing, the teacher of any art or craft hesitates 
not to say to his pupil "Imitate me; do as I do." 
Why should not the parent, the Sunday school 
teacher, the pastor be ready to say the same 
thing.? 

The point to be noted, however, in these words 
of Paul is that he was both a follower and a 
leader. It was because he was a humble and 
faithful follower that he was fit to be a brave and 
safe and enterprising leader. When, therefore, 
we put our question, *' Shall we be followers or 
leaders.?" we are entitled, by the experience and 
testimony of one of the greatest men who ever 
lived, to answer: We will be both. We could not 
well be the one without being the other. We 
could not lead in any intelligent and effective 
way unless we had first learned to follow, and we 
could not follow any high and worthy leadership 
without becoming leaders. 

This brings us in sight of a great law of all the 
kingdoms of life, that every living thing stands 
in this double relation of antecedent and conse- 
quent, of cause and effect, of progenitor and 
pffspring. The seed produces the plant and the 



LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 209 

plant produces the seed. At one stage of its life 
it is in one relation, and at another stage it is 
in another relation. The one no more than the 
other is its true character. You might ask re- 
specting some human spirit about to be born 
into the world: "Shall he be a child or a man.^" 
The reply that Nature would make would be: 
"He shall be both. He cannot be a man without 
first becoming a child. It will be well for him, 
if in his childhood he is always reaching forth to 
the estate of manhood — if he is a manly boy; and 
equally well with him, if in his manhood he keeps 
much of the spirit of the child; only thus shall 
he enter into the kingdom of God." In much the 
same way must we answer the question now 
before us. All good leaders must first be true 
and faithful followers; all wise and loyal followers 
are sure to become good leaders. 

Let us assume then, first, that the art of fol- 
lowing — the business of following — is part of the 
regimen appointed for every man. 

The modern educational psychologists make 
much of this principle. They show that the 
imitative tendency must be relied on very largely 
in the earlier stages of education. Professor 
Baldwin says that a child does not begin to imi- 
tate until he is five or six months old, but "when 
the imitative impulse does come it comes in 



2IO COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

earnest. For many months after its rise it may 
be called, perhaps, the controlling impulse. Its 
importance in the growth of the child's mind is 
largely in connection with the development of 
language and of muscular movement." 

Perhaps the largest single feat which the human 
being ever performs is the learning of a language 
in the first two or three years of his life, and this 
is wholly a process of imitation. Why does the 
child brought up in an English-speaking family 
speak English, rather than French or Italian.? 
Simply because imitation is the law of his being; 
he follows and must follow the speech that he 
hears. So with his general outfit of ideas and 
habits and customs — they are largely the product 
of imitation. *' Human beings," says Professor 
Mackenzie, "have an intrinsic relation to their 
society, in so far as their individual nature is 
formed and colored by it. . . . Each nation and 
tribe produces in its children its own type of 
character, which has grown up in it, through the 
influence of the physical surroundings and past 
history of the people. . . . After the individual 
has been produced, with his particular type of 
potential character, the direction in which that 
character develops is determined mainly by the 
habits and customs of his particular people and 
class. ..." 



LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS ? ill 

"Suggestibility" — that is the outlandish word 
which modern psychology has succeeded in im- 
posing on us and which, I suppose we shall be 
obliged to use; it means readiness to receive im- 
pressions from other minds, and to be guided by 
them. Hypnotic subjects are practically en- 
slaved in this way: that is a morbid development 
of this attribute of mind. But it belongs to all 
of us in a greater or less degree, and it is the organ 
by which a large part of our personal gains of 
knowledge and experience and character arc 
made, by which the fruits of civilization are con- 
served, by which the world's store of intellectual 
and artistic power is transmitted. 

It is true that by means of this trait of human 
nature superstition and error arc propagated, 
and millions are led into folly and misery. It is 
this tendency that explains such a phenomenon as 
Dowieism with the terrible catastrophe of finan- 
cial disaster and the shipwreck of faith which 
inevitably followed. The tens of thousands over 
whom this impostor was able to establish such 
an ascendency not only lost all the money they 
contributed to his crazy schemes, but most of 
them lost all their faith in man and in religion and 
in God. It is sorry logic by which they came to 
this conclusion, but if they had been logicians 
they would not have been disciples of Dowie. 



212 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

Such a career as his is a lamentable illustration 
not only of the readiness of people to be led, but 
also of their incapacity to choose safe leaders. 
These Dowieites were not, as a rule, bad people; 
they were honest, ingenuous, well-meaning folk 
to whom the downfall of the prophet they trusted 
proved a tragedy indeed. 

We have always before our eyes such instances 
of the evils which may result from the suggesti- 
bility of the masses. And yet, as I have said, 
even this lower and less rational form of unques- 
tioning imitation is used by Providence to ad- 
vance the welfare of mankind. "Most people," 
says Professor Cooley, " are so far suggestible that 
they make no energetic and persistent attempt 
to interpret in any broad way the elements of 
life accessible to them, but receive the stamp of 
some rather narrow and simple class of sugges- 
tions to which their allegiance is yielded. There 
are innumerable people of much energy but 
sluggish intellect who will go ahead — as all who 
have energy must do — but what direction they 
shall take is a matter of the opportune suggestion. 
The humbler walks of religion and philanthropy, 
for instance, the Salvation Army, the village 
prayer meeting and the city mission are full of 
such. They do not reason on general principles 
but believe and labor. The intellectual travail 



LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS ? 2 1 3 

of the time does not directly touch them. At 
some epoch In the past, perhaps In some home of 
emotional exaltation, something was printed on 
their minds to remain there till death, and to be 
read and followed dally. To the philosophers 
such people are fanatics, but their function Is as 
Important as his. They are repositories of moral 
energy — which he Is very likely to lack — they 
are the people who brought in Christianity and 
have kept It going ever since. And this is only 
one of many comparatively automatic types of 
mankind.'' 

Still It must not be forgotten that this ability 
to receive suggestions and to be moved by in- 
fluences from without and above one's self, does 
not belong exclusively to the ignorant and the 
lowly. The greatest men are open to such In- 
fluences and move freely under them. Most of 
the great leaders have themselves been docile 
followers. Carlyle was, perhaps, one of the most 
positive intellectual forces of the nineteenth 
century, with a strong initiative and a great 
following; but one who reads FIchte's popular 
works after he has read Carlyle will find that 
Carlyle Is simply saturated with Fichte. Fichte 
himself was possibly the greatest moral force in 
Prussia when that nation rose to life after Its 
terrible downfall In the Napoleonic invasion; it 



214 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

was his burning words that kindled the spirit of 
resistance and heroic endeavor; but Fichte be- 
came the man he was because Kant in his " Critical 
Philosophy" opened to him the significance of 
life. By this he says he was led into "a new and 
nobler morality" and filled with a peace which 
he had never before experienced; "I propose," 
he declares, " to devote some years of my life to 
this philosophy, and all that I write, at least for 
some time to come shall have reference to it." 
Thus we see by whom this leader of leaders him- 
self was led. 

There are three great names among the English 
Broad Churchmen, Arthur Stanley, Charles 
Kingsley, Frederick Robertson, and it is easy 
for anyone who studies their biographies to see 
that the intellectual influence which had most 
to do with the shaping of the opinions of these 
men was that of Frederick Denison Maurice, a 
quiet man, their contemporary, whose powerful 
grasp on the great spiritual verities gave them 
their main constructive ideas. 

The great leader of the scientific renaissance 
of the nineteenth century one hardly needs to 
name. Was Charles Darwin a follower as well 
as a leader.? Let him answer for himself. He 
had just been reading in his youth Humboldt's 
"Personal Narrative." "This work," he says, 



( 



LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 215 

"stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the 
most humble contribution to the noble structure 
of Natural Science." 

It is not, then, the fools and the dupes alone 
who have been enthusiastic followers; the noblest 
and the strongest of mankind have confessed 
themselves disciples of those wiser than them- 
selves and imitators of those in whose characters 
they saw their own ideals realized. 

It may be true that in our younger years we 
are most in need of such guides and masters; 
but no really great man ever quite outgrows this 
need. "If youth is the period of hero-worship," 
says Professor Cooley, "so also is it true that 
hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, 
gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to ex- 
pand one's self, to forget the rest, to have a sense 
of newness and life and hope, is to feel young 
at any time of life. 'Whilst we converse with 
what is above us we do not grow old but young,' 
and that is what hero-worship means. To have 
no heroes is to have no aspirations, to live on the 
momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon 
routine, sensuality and the narrow self." 

Therefore, young men and women, I hope 
that you will never cease to be ardent and en- 
thusiastic followers. When you have reached 
the point at which there is nobody above you to 



2l6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

whom you can look up, and nobody ahead of 
you whom you want to overtake, you will be of 
very little use in this world; the sooner you are 
taken out of it the better for you and for your 
fellow men. 

Besides it is an obvious truth that in the vast 
co-operations of all kinds, industrial, civic, intel- 
lectual, by which our civilization is advanced, 
followers are needed as well as leaders. All can- 
not be captains in any company; some must 
train in the ranks. There is no man in society, 
no matter how exalted his position, who does not 
often find himself in relations in which the re- 
sponsibility for leadership belongs to some one 
else, and in which he can only help by faithful 
and loyal following. If he has not learned to 
work in harness, to subordinate his own personal 
notions and preferences, and to co-operate in 
realizing the plans of others, — even when these 
plans do not always seem to him entirely wise — 
he is not fit to be a citizen of a democratic re- 
public. One of the essential elements of good 
citizenship is the ability to follow your leader. 

It is hardly needful to add, that we are re- 
sponsible for the choice of our leaders. It is not 
to any blind loyalties that we are summoned: we 
must have good reason for our faith in those 
we follow. We must have ideals of our own, and 



LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 217 

know their meaning, and have reason to believe 
that the men to whom we give our allegiance at 
best fairly represent those ideals. There is 
nothing better for us than to admire and follow 
worthy leaders. "We feed our characters, while 
they are forming," says Professor Cooley, "upon 
the vision of admired models; an ardent sym- 
pathy dwells upon the traits through which their 
personality is communicated to us — facial ex- 
pression, voice, significant movements, and so 
on. In this way those tendencies in us that are 
toward them are literally fed, are stimulated, 
organized, made habitual and familiar. . . . All 
autobiographies which deal with youth show that 
the early development of character is through a 
series of admirations and enthusiasms which 
pass away, to be sure, but leave character the 
richer for their existence. They begin in the 
nursery, flourish with great vigor in the school 
yard, attain a passionate intensity during adoles- 
cence, and although they abate rapidly in adult 
life, do not altogether cease until the power of 
growth is past." 

I counsel you, therefore, to cultivate your 
enthusiasms for the best men you know — the 
wisest, the strongest, the most unselfish and 
honorable men. Get acquainted with them if 
you can. Do not let your shyness or your self- 



2l8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

depreciation hinder you from seizing upon op- 
portunities of coming into personal contact with 
those whom you most honor. To nothing am 
I more indebted than to a few friendships which 
I was able, in my mere youth, to form with men 
of great ability and high ideals. I am constrained 
to speak the names of some of them, — ^Josiah 
Gilbert Holland, Samuel Bowles, Mark Hop- 
kins, Richard Salter Storrs, George William 
Curtis, Howard Crosby, Horace Bushnell, John 
Bascom — -all these are gone to their reward. 
Other great men I have admired at a distance; 
but these were kind enough, in my young man- 
hood, though much older than I was, and stand- 
ing far above me — to number me among their 
friends; and the inspiration and enlargement 
of life which has come to me through their 
friendship is a precious and enduring possession. 
I know the value of such friendships with men 
to whom I could look up, — and I counsel you to 
lose no opportunity of putting yourselves under 
such influences. 

But we said, at the outset, that every man is 
called to be not merely a follower but also a leader. 
To be merely a follower — merely passive, and 
receptive, — is not the vocation of a man. The 
Christian ideal is simply the ideal of manhood; 
Christianity proposes to do nothing more for 



LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 219 

any of us than to help us to be men. And Chris- 
tianity calls all men to be followers of a Leader 
that they in turn may be leaders. The Founder 
said to his first disciples, whom he found fishing 
by the lakeside, "Follow me and I will make you 
fishers of men," and the last word to men in the 
last book of the New Testament is "Let him 
that heareth say Come!" He who says "Come," 
must be one who is going forward himself and 
summoning others to go with him. 

The vocation of a Christian man — the voca- 
tion of a man — involves, then, this function of 
leadership. No one is so humble that he may 
not, if he is going in the right way, lead others in 
that way. It is a great error to conceive that 
the human race is divided into leaders and fol- 
lowers — some who always lead and never follow, — 
others who always follow and never lead. Every 
leader must often be a follower; every follower 
should always be a leader. 

Indeed it is impossible that it should be other- 
wise, in any normal society. The man who loyally 
follows good leadership will be so filled with 
the spirit of his leader that he must needs attract 
others; just as the iron that comes in contact 
with the magnet itself becomes a magnet. 

Yet I fear that there are many who do not 
clearly comprehend this part of their vocation. 



220 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

There are many who are quite too passive and 
negative, — who are suggestible enough but never 
suggestive; who are the echoes of other voices, 
but never speak out of their own knowledge and 
conviction. Quite too many haye we, in all our 
societies, political, artistic, educational, religious, 
who have no minds of their own, no wills of their 
own, who are not workmen but tools; not causes 
but effects. It is this class of persons to whom 
one of the younger poets * in a recent periodical, 
addresses these rather caustic inquiries: 

"Are You You.? 
Are you a trailer or are you a trolley.? 
Are you tagged to a leader through wisdom and folly? 

Are you Somebody Else, or You .? 
Do you vote by the symbol and swallow It straight.? 
Do you pray by the book, do you pay by the rate, 
Do you tie your cravat by the calendar's date.? 

Do you follow a cue? 

"Are you a writer or that which is worded? 
Are you a shepherd, or one of the herded? 

Which are you — a What or a Who? 
It sounds well to call yourself 'one of the flock,' 
But a sheep is a sheep after all. At the block 
You are nothing but mutton, or possibly stock: 

Would you flavor a stew? 

"Are you a being and boss of your soul, 
Or are you a mummy to carry a scroll, 
* Edmund Vance Cooke. 



LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS f 111 

Are you Somebody Else, or You? 
When you finally pass to the heavenly wicket 
Where Peter the Scrutinous stands at his picket, 
Are you going to give him a blank for a ticket? 

Do you think it will do?" 

The words are somewhat unconventional, but 
they put rather pithily a question which most of 
us need to consider. For the true following is 
not slavish imitation; it always involves the 
appropriation of the impulse received from an- 
other, and the reaction upon it of a true insight 
and independent judgment by which the re- 
cipient makes it his own. This always involves 
some transformation of the impulse received; it 
is not just the same thing in the life of the follower 
that it was in the life of the leader; the impress 
of a new personality has been stamped upon it. 
Fichte owed to Kant the central and constructive 
ideas of his philosophy, but Fichte's restatement 
of Kant's principles is after all something quite 
fresh and new; and Carlyle uses Fichte's ideas 
in a very independent way; he has digested and 
assimilated them and they are as truly his own 
as if he had discovered them all. None of us 
needs to be ashamed to be a follower, but every 
one of us must be something more than a mere 
copyist or transmitter of energy; we must be 
centers of life and power. 



222 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

Two qualities are united in true leadership, 
self-reliance and sympathy. The leader must 
be an individual; it must be evident that he 
stands on his own feet and does his own think- 
ing; that what he speaks is not hearsay but per- 
sonal conviction; that he knows what he knows. 
That was what the people said about Jesus: "He 
speaks as one having authority and not as the 
Scribes." 

On the other hand, the leader must be in living 
touch with men, with all sorts of men. "Per- 
sonality," says Dr. Gordon, "stands for two 
things — the uniqueness of the individual and his 
universality. The uniqueness marks his reality, 
so that he does not blend in the social mass as 
the drop does in the ocean. The universality is 
his power of rational sympathy, the faculty by 
which he is able to share the thought, the passion 
and the purpose of the widest and noblest social 
whole." 

Both these qualities we need to cultivate, 
neither to the exclusion or the suppression of the 
other. We must be self-reliant men, and we must 
be men of largest and truest sympathy, k "Suc- 
cess," says Mr. Cooley, "in unfolding a special 
tendency and giving vogue to it, depends upon 
being in touch, through sympathy, with the 
current of human life. All leadership takes place 



LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 223 

through the communication of ideas to the minds 
of others, and unless the Ideas are so presented 
as to be congenial to those other minds, they 
will evidently be rejected." 

To be a successful leader, you must have life 
in yourself, and you must have large power of 
sharing the life of your fellows. You must have 
something to Impart, and you must know how 
to put yourself Into communication with the 
minds and hearts of those whom you would lead, 
^his function of leadership Is one of the highest 
possessed by man, and one of the worst abused. 
Satan, In Milton's mythology, Is the type of the 
bad leader, but there are many on the earth who 
have learned his methods only too well. The 
leader who gets his following by appealing to 
men's lower Instincts, by stimulating their ap- 
petites and their passions and their hatreds, 
by pampering their greed, by developing their 
selfishness is engaged in diabolical business. The 
political leader whose methods are mainly mer- 
cenary, who baits men with the spoils of office, 
who carries his points by the use of money In 
elections, by bribery and corruption, whose entire 
influence upon those with whom he comes in 
contact tends to the destruction of their ideals 
and the degradation of their character, — comes 
as near to doing devil's work as mortal man can 



224 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

come. The Influence upon politics of men like 
Croker and Quay and Murphy is more malign 
than any words can tell. To such a career as 
this I trust no young man who hears me will 
ever aspire. It is bad enough to walk in the down- 
ward way yourself; but to lead others in that 
way; to help in lowering the standards, and poison- 
ing the thoughts and perverting the characters of 
your fellows, — above all to encourage them in be- 
coming traitors to the commonwealth, or parasites 
upon its life, or plunderers of its treasure, — this 
involves a moral degradation and a doom to which 
I hope none of you will expose yourselves. 

On the other hand, there is nothing more en- 
nobling than good leadership, — whether to the 
leader or to the led. To appeal to all that is best 
in men; to quicken and stimulate their sense of 
justice and truth and honor; to hold up before 
them the ideals of character and service; to en- 
list them in work that deepens their humanity 
and enlarges their patriotism, — this is labor 
which needs no other compensation than the 
privilege of doing it. It is the kind of work which 
is greatly needed, just now, in the church and in 
the nation; and I trust that many of you may 
not only be loyal followers of that which is good, 
but brave and true leaders of men and women 
in the ways of life. 



( 



XI 

FORM AND SUBSTANCE 



XI 
FORM AND SUBSTANCE 

IN an ancient writing familiar to some of us, 
judgment is passed on those having the 
form of godliness, but wanting the power 
thereof. The form without the power, — it is 
not a rare phenomenon. In the mechanical 
realm we sometimes see a machine discon- 
nected from the powers which should give it 
motion. Wheels and cranks and pinions and 
gearings are all in evidence; the machinery is 
properly fashioned and all the adjustments are 
here except that which attaches it to the motive 
power. So long as this is lacking the mechanism 
is motionless; if for any reason that motive power 
cannot be supplied it is worthless; all its struc- 
tural perfection becomes a pitiful waste. 

In our childhood we were sometimes offered 
for our diversion the form without the power in 
the shape of dumb watches, wooden guns and 
other toys of similar character — simulacra of 
things which employ energy. To many of us, I 
dare say, these toys were wont to give more dis- 
content than pleasure; the unreality of the thing 
227 



228 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

is apt to irritate the boy's mind; the real watch 
and gun, when he gets them, afford him a grati- 
fication which has been enhanced by his mental 
revolt against the effigies which have been im- 
posed on him. In the mechanical realm, how- 
ever, the form is rarely disconnected from the 
power; the futility of that is sufficiently obvious. 
Most sane persons are aware that a steam engine 
without a boiler or a waterwheel by the side of a 
dried up stream would be foolish investments. 

But when we rise into the Kingdoms of life 
and mind, the form without the power constantly 
confronts us. We begin with dolls and toy ani- 
mals, and we go on through all our lives sur- 
rounded by objects which represent living things 
though there is no life in them. The realm of 
art is largely devoted to such representations. 
The Memphian reliefs, the Sphinx in the desert, 
the Elgin marbles, the lions of St. Mark, the 
marvels of the Vatican and the Louvre, the 
beasts of Barye, the figures of Rodin, the statues 
of St. Gaudens, the whole wonder-world of 
modern sculpture and not less of painting — land- 
scapes as well as figures — exhibit to us 'the age- 
long effort of the human mind to represent form 
without life. We must not say that all this is 
abnormal and fictitious; there must be a place 
in our world for forms of life that are destitute 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 229 

of its power. The purpose of these representa- 
tions is to assist us in discerning and delighting 
in the forms of beauty which nature is evermore 
producing. Our attempt to imitate the work of 
life may spring from a profound reverence for 
the power whose work we are copying. The 
statue or the picture gives us the form without 
the life, but imagination supplies the life behind 
the form and rejoices in it. Art has its function 
and its ministry and ought to be the handmaid of 
morality. 

When we ascend into the supersensuous realm, 
the divorce between form and power or form and 
life seems less admissible. The form of godliness 
without the power thereof is not a thing to be 
admired. The same would be true of meekness 
or humility or courtesy or kindness. The sem- 
blance of a natural object may be a serviceable 
possession; are we justified in seeking to produce 
the semblance of an act of worship.^ Clearly we 
have now passed into a realm where the art im- 
pulse must no longer bear rule. Form without 
power is here a ghastly impertinence. The 
counterfeit presentment of prayer, of praise, of 
religious service must be as offensive in the sight 
of the eternal Reality as anything can be. When 
we are dealing with Him there is no room for 
masks or pretenses. 



230 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

Yet there are forms In all worship and religious 
service; must these lie under condemnation? 
Forms of praise, forms of prayer, beautiful hymns, 
stately litanies, words of salutation and of bene- 
diction — more or less of all these abides in all 
our religious observance. Catholic and Quaker 
differ in the use of such instruments only in degree. 
What must we say of these? 

We must not say that they are necessarily 
forms without life; they are forms which life 
has created; they are words in which devout 
hearts found utterance; and to words belong a 
certain power of retaining and reincarnating the 
life that gave them being. Jesus said, "The 
words that I speak unto you they are spirit and 
they are life." That was true when the words 
were spoken, it is true of them still. Of all words 
which are the sincere utterance of great lives the 
same may be said. The liturgies, the hymns, the 
well-worn phrases of our common worship were 
the sincere words of devout souls, and it is pos- 
sible for us, in some good degree, to put our- 
selves in their places and to realize the meaning 
of their words; and so far as we are able to attain 
to this the form is not without power. 

After all is said, however, we must still confess 
that there is a sad disparity in our world between 
the form and the power of godliness. Vast are 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 23 1 

the enclosures of devout observance, of decent 
ceremony, which are full of emptiness. If we 
could only fill all the pious words which are 
dally spoken with real meaning; If we could only 
secure a genuine wish for every prayer, and a 
hearty purpose for every promise, how quickly 
would the city of God descend from heaven and 
fill the earth! Is not the problem of religion 
to-day mainly this: to find contents for empty 
forms; to replenish vacant ceremonials; to lessen 
the chasm between profession and performance? 

I have dwelt upon this particular phase of the 
lack of correspondence between form and power 
because these Illustrations are familiar. In many 
other departments of human Interest, however, 
we observe the same conditions. 

In philanthropy, for example, the excess of 
form over power Is significant. If we study the 
mechanism of our philanthropies, public and 
private, and compare what is devised and ad- 
vertised with what Is done the result is depress- 
ing. Much of the machinery hardly moves, only 
a small part of It Is efficient and productive. 
Apparatus we have In abundance, and we even 
manage to collect and distribute a large amount 
of money, but there is a serious lack of vital 
power in much of our philanthropy. Nothing 
ought to bear this great name which does not 



232 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

promote human welfare. Temporary alleviation 
of bodily discomfort which only tends to produce 
moral deterioration is not philanthropy. What a 
vast change would pass upon the face of our 
society if the forms of philanthropic service could 
all be filled with the power of a true philan- 
thropy. 

Of freedom, too, we have in this democratic 
state far more of the machinery than of the 
motive power. What is democracy .f* It is the 
rule of the people, and, presumably, of people who 
are fit to rule. It implies the intelligent partici- 
pation of all the citizens in the government. It 
requires of every voter an independent judg- 
ment upon public questions. Every man must be 
trained to think and decide; in the multitude of 
such counsellors there is safety. This is the theory 
of democracy; we have it here on paper; our 
constitutions enfranchise all male adults, and 
promise the enfranchisement of all females; and 
our election laws provide for ascertaining the 
will of the people, but will anyone say that the 
will of the people is intelligently and fairly ex- 
pressed in our elections ? Is that a true democracy 
in which a considerable percentage of the voters 
sell their suffrages for money? Is that a true 
democracy in which most voters find themselves 
at most elections shut up to a choice among two 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 2^ 

or three sets of candidates, few of whom they 
know and fewer of whom they trust? 

All these illustrations help to bring before us 
the truth with which we are more particularly 
concerned to-day — the truth of the disparity in 
the popular intelligence between the forms of 
learning and the power thereof. Of the shows 
and semblances of culture we have much; of the 
substance we have something less. The super- 
ficiality of much of our modern education needs 
not to be demonstrated; it takes abundant 
opportunities of advertising itself. 

It is not to be expected that any system of 
education would give us perfect results. But we 
might reasonably hope to come a little nearer to 
perfection. 

We teach our children to read, we say. This 
is the educational minimum. Below this we do 
not propose to suffer anyone to fall. Our ambi- 
tion is to put the power within the reach of all, 
and our boast is that we so nearly realize our 
ambition. Here now Is a simple and convenient 
test of our educational methods. Are we really 
teaching our children to read? Some of them 
can; I will not venture on percentages. But It Is 
obvious that many who pass the final examina- 
tions with credit have not learned to read. They 
may pronounce most of the words with tolerable 



234 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

accuracy, but give them a serious page of history 
or description and bid them read it, and then 
close the book and tell you what it is all 
about, and a large share of them cannot do it. 
Any high school teacher will tell you that a con- 
siderable proportion of those who come up from 
the elementary grades are in some such condition 
as this. They have mastered the art of reading 
as to its form, but its substance has escaped them. 
That reading is simply apprehending and appro- 
priating the thought of the writer, they have not 
understood. 

It is notorious, of course, that many a boy 
learns all the processes of arithmetic without 
knowing how to apply them to practical problems. 

I am not disposed to put the whole blame for 
this superficiality on the public schools. If in 
education there is a good deal of surface work, 
and much teaching that is pretentious rather 
than thorough it is because there is an urgent 
popular demand for this sort of thing. The dis- 
position to care for the outside, to be content 
with the merest smattering of knowledge is too 
prevalent. We have heard of institutions that 
promise to impart a sufiicient knowledge of 
any of the ancient or modern languages in six 
months; and I have known a chartered college 
to give the degree of Bachelor of Arts to one who 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 235 

had never attended a recitation or passed an 
examination. It is a case of supply and demand, 
in which demand creates supply and supply in 
its turn stimulates demand. Multitudes of our 
young people are in great haste to begin the work 
of life; long periods of preparation are irksome; 
they are more than ready to listen to those who 
assure them that a smattering of language and 
of science is all they need. 

I am not unmindful of the fact that our wisest 
educators are constantly striving against this 
tendency, and that in many of our best institu- 
tions the demand for substantial results is steadily 
rising. And yet we must confess that among the 
people who are said to have been educated in 
these schools, we still find symptoms of a de- 
plorable lack of the power of sound thinking. 

Study the contents of our daily newspapers of 
largest circulation. To what shall we attribute 
this hysterical rhetoric, these flatulent narratives 
of events that have no significance, this prodig- 
ious enterprise in gathering up and working over 
the disgusting and harrowing details of vice and 
crime. Measure the space which has been given 
in American newspapers to a personage like Harry 
Thaw. 

We are told by the managers of these news- 
papers of vast circulation that they are only 



236 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

supplying the popular demand. This Is, per- 
haps, not quite the whole truth. They are help- 
ing to create the demand. But are the people 
who demand this sort of thing educated people.? 
Have they learned to think.? Have they learned 
to read.? Is the most popular daily newspaper 
of the present day the fruit of our present system 
of public education.? If it is not, what is it.? 

Consider the success which those preposterous 
endowment orders were winning, but a few years 
ago, all over the country. Sixty or seventy of 
them were reported as operating, not in the wild 
west, but in Massachusetts; and their constit- 
uency included multitudes of clerks and profes- 
sional men and school teachers. All these people 
had presumably studied arithmetic in the public 
schools, and had been taught to add and subtract 
and multiply and divide, and knew something 
about the current rates of interest; yet they 
were able to believe that three hundred dollars, 
all told, in monthly installments, would bring 
them, at the end of seven years, one thousand 
dollars; — that a financial institution promising 
such returns as these offered them a safe and 
reasonable investment for their money. Are the 
people educated to whom the absurdity of schemes 
like these is not, at a glance, apparent.? 

Reflect upon the prevalence in all our com- 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 237 

munities of crazy preternaturalisms, which are 
utterly destitute of rational or historical founda- 
tions, and which presume a degree of credulity 
that would have been natural to wild Africans 
or Patagonians, but that can hardly be accounted 
for in civilized peoples of the twentieth century. '*: 
The Dowieites were generally graduates of our \ 
schools. Pastor Russell collects his devotees 
among people who can read and write. The 
Mormons are not, as a class, illiterate, by our 
standards. 

The same thing must be said of the throngs 
who crowd the tabernacles and stuff the coffers 
of a present-day evangelism which has no diffi- 
culty in convincing the multitude that the 
theology of the Dark Ages and the spirit of the 
Inquisition and the coarseness of the fish-market 
and the greed of the wheat pit are fitting illustra- 
tions of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. 

Study the campaign literature scattered all 
over this continent by secret organizations which 
boast of millions of voters, and be amazed at 
the grotesque and preposterous forgeries and 
fabrications, which are swallowed without ques- 
tion or protest by hundreds of thousands of the 
ministers and members of American Protestant 
churches. 

I will not extend these illustrations. But do 



238 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

not symptoms like these, the tale of which could 
easily be multiplied, indicate some reason for 
the misgiving that when we call ourselves an 
educated people we need to qualify the affirma- 
tion. And after such a survey is not the question 
forced upon us whether the popular intelligence 
on which, in this country, we must wholly rely 
for the solution of those critical questions of 
economics and ethics and politics which now 
confront us, is sound and strong enough to bear 
the strain which we are putting upon it? It may 
seem faithless and unpatriotic to ask the ques- 
tion, but I am constrained to ask it. And I fear 
that we must say that while our systems of 
education give to the great majority of our citi- 
zens certain rudimentary forms of learning, of 
the trained intelligence and the disciplined judg- 
ment which are necessary for the wise adminis- 
tration of the great affairs of the church and the 
nation there is yet a vast deficiency. It would 
be difficult, I think, to overstate the extent of 
this deficiency or the peril to the state which 
it involves. The easy-going optimism of Amer- 
icans always ignores or denies it; for this over- 
confidence we are likely to have a large account 
to settle at no distant day. 

It may be said, it is always said, that the popu- 
lar intelligence has been able, thus far, to conduct 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 239 

the nation safely through Its perils; and there is 
ground of hope here of which we ought to make 
as much as we can. But if we would be entirely 
sane in our judgment we must recognize the 
fact that the conditions which we now confront 
are quite different from those through which 
we were passing during the war of the Rebellion, 
and the war of the Revolution. The last great 
struggle Involved two very simple questions 
which the least educated people could easily 
understand: the question of the rightfulness of 
slavery and the question of the Integrity of the 
nation. Reduce political issues to terms as 
simple as these and you may safely trust them 
to the common sense of a very poorly educated 
people. 

In the times of the Revolution, and especially 
in the years following the Revolution, when the 
political fabric was reconstructed, certain political 
problems of the first order had to be solved, and 
every American is proud of the skill and sagacity 
exhibited by the framers of our Constitution. 
Have we not men of equal ability and probity 
to whom we might now confide the great task 
committed to us.^ I will not doubt that such 
men might be found, though the standard set by 
that great Constitutional Convention at Phila- 
delphia was a high one. But is there any chance, 



240 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

as things are now going, of getting our great 
problems Into the hands of these capable men? 
One hundred years ago the people seem to have 
been aware that none but men of the highest 
Intelligence and the broadest experience were 
capable of dealing with such difficult concerns. 
Such men they found, and followed their leader- 
ship. 

This generation has had thrust upon its hands 
questions far more difficult and intricate than 
those with which the men of 1787 were compelled 
to deal. The whole economic structure of so- 
ciety Is shaking under the agitations of our social 
life; an industrial revolution certainly no less 
momentous than the political revolution of the 
eighteenth century Is now threatened; and we 
do not seem to be at all aware of the fact that 
we need skilled and experienced leaders for this 
exigency. Indeed it would appear that the men 
who are competent to deal with these questions 
are the very men for whom the people have no 
use. The scholars, the "college professors," 
generally In derisive quotation marks, the "high- 
brows," — the men who know something of the 
history and experience of the world, are the 
men whose judgment is apt to be spurned and 
whose counsels ignored. This is the tone of the 
average political leader — of the average news- 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 241 

paper. As a people we are quite apt to resent 
the interference in political affairs of men of 
trained intelligence and disciplined judgment. 
Are not we, forsooth, all educated people.? Have 
we not had the advantages of the public schools.? 
Are we not capable of deciding, off hand, these 
great questions of economics and social organiza- 
tion.? So every demagogue on the stump or in 
the sanctum assures the dear people, and why 
should they not believe it.? 

For these reasons, therefore, — because the ques- 
tions now upon our hands need a broader wisdom 
than any which we have hitherto required, and 
because we are now, as a people, so little conscious 
of this need, the deliverances of the past hardly 
warrant the confident expectation of present de- 
liverance. We need for this hour a quality of 
popular intelligence altogether higher, clearer, 
sounder than has ever been called into exercise 
in this nation or in any other; the form of it we 
have, the conceit of it we have abundantly, the 
substance of it, the power of it, I greatly fear that 
we have not. 

The sober words of a great and wise friend of 
this nation, Lord Bryce, deserve our candid 
consideration. "The Americans," says Lord 
Bryce, "are an educated people, compared with 
the whole mass of the population in any European 



242 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

country except Switzerland, parts of Germany, 
parts of Norway, Iceland and Scotland; that is 
to say, the average of knowledge is higher, the 
habit of reading and thinking more generally 
diffused, than in any other country. . . . That 
the education of the masses is nevertheless a 
superficial education goes without saying. It is 
sufficient to enable them to think they know 
something about the great problems of politics; 
insufficient to show them how little they know. 
The public elementary school gives everybody 
the key to knowledge, in making reading and 
writing familiar, but it has not time to teach 
him to use the key, whose use is in fact, by the 
pressure of daily work, almost confined to the 
newspaper and the magazine. So we may say 
that if the political education of the average 
American voter be compared with that of the 
average voter in Europe it stands high; but if U 
be compared with the functions which the theory of 
the American government lays on him, which its 
spirit implies, which the methods of its party or- 
ganization assume, its inadequacy is manifest.^^ 

For, as Mr. Bryce goes on to show, the respon- 
sibility laid on the American voter is far heavier 
than that imposed on voters in the free countries 
of Europe. In England, for example, all that 
the citizen is called to do for the national govern- 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 243 

ment is to elect members of parliament. Not only 
are the issues of policy settled by the Parliament 
but all national executive officers are chosen by 
the same body. But *'the American citizen is 
virtually one of the governors of the republic. 
Issues are decided and rulers selected by the 
direct popular vote." The amount of trained 
intelligence, of disciplined judgment required of 
an American voter Is far greater than is needed 
by the voters In most European countries. For 
such tasks and responsibilities as we have laid 
on him, is not the equipment which he receives 
altogether insufficient.^ 

The disparity between the popular intelligence 
and the tasks laid upon It in this country Is not, 
then, due so much to the fact that popular educa- 
tion among us is Inferior to the best of other 
countries, as to the fact that the work given it 
to do Is immeasurably heavier here than there. 
It Is this — let me say it over many times — which 
makes the situation before us so grave and 
critical. Yet it ought not to be supposed that 
the condition which we are considering — the 
disparity between the form and the substance of 
culture — Is peculiar to this country. It Is the 
characteristic of the age in which we are living. 
It Is the result of the rapid extension, within the 
past century, of the opportunities and preroga- 



244 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

tives of education. I suppose that It Is Inevitable, 
in such a case, that the form should be enlarged 
much more rapidly than the substance Is sup- 
plied. The new rich easily and quickly provide 
themselves with the externals of gentility, but it 
takes a generation or two to furnish the reality, 
during which period we have a sort of thing which 
is much less lovely than the homespun simplicity 
which has been left behind. And something like 
this is seen In the Intellectual development of 
the present century. It Is an Englishman of 
philosophic mind who has given us a striking 
comparison between the causes which produced 
the Dark Ages, and those which are operating In 
the intellectual world at the present time. He 
shows us how the best social ideals of Greece, 
flung Into the weltering barbarisms of Europe, 
had to wait a thousand years before they could 
fully organize its life. Similarly "the dawn of 
the French Revolution and the outburst of Ideas 
contemporary with It," have enormously en- 
larged the mere external forms of culture without 
supplying their substance. "Have we not," he 
asks, "as a consequence of the great renaissance 
of a hundred years ago, attained an advance 
which no one has rightly estimated, at the cost 
of a retrogression which no one has rightly under- 
stood.^ What we have attained is the universal 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 245 

right to argue, to have an opinion, to be heard 
through the speech on the platform, the book, 
the pamphlet and the newspaper — the recogni- 
tion that civilized man enjoys as his common 
birthright the form of articulate human intelli- 
gence. What, by this very advance, we have 
lost for the time, is the adequacy of the substance 
of culture to its form. Never before, in the his- 
tory of the human race, have the facilities of 
thought and expression been so distributed as to 
render possible so wild and immeasurable an 
ocean of error. For positive error — and this is 
the simplest statement of my meaning, — has 
now taken the place of ignorance. ... If early 
Christianity took on its shoulders the spiritual 
welfare of the masses in a very narrow sense, the 
nineteenth century has taken on its shoulders 
their intellectual and moral welfare in the very 
broadest and deepest sense. Do we suppose 
that enormous benefits to the race can be ob- 
tained without paying a price.? A glance at those 
countries where education in the general or 
formal sense is most universal and best appre- 
ciated, will assure us of the contrary. There is 
nothing which large sections of the educated 
populace (in all ranks of society) will not believe. 
There is no absurdity so gross as not to find 
its able journalistic supporters. There is no 



246 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

opinion which is not maintained, by persons 
equipped with full powers of articulate expres- 
sion, with a granite obstinacy and indifference to 
reason and experience. There is nothing so bad 
in art and literature that it will not be welcomed 
with exultation by an enthusiastic crowd, quite 
capable of maintaining their conceptions in lan- 
guage to all appearance not unworthy of the re- 
public of letters. Of this republic, I repeat, all 
men are now in theory qualified citizens, and it 
wants but little for them to take up the external 
privileges of citizenship." 

If these are true words, then the condition we 
are confronting is one that we share with all pro- 
gressive nations. But the universality of the 
disorder does not reduce its danger. And we 
have already discovered reasons why this danger 
is greater here than anywhere else. 

These are very serious reflections, my friends; 
they do not contribute, I fear, to the hilarity of 
these festivities; it is not the kind of message to 
which most of us prefer to listen. It is the testi- 
mony of one who does not believe that an op- 
timistic drifting upon prevailing currents is good 
policy for this nation at this hour. This nation 
has chosen to commit its momentous problems 
to the arbitrament of the popular intelligence. 
Never, in all history, were rulers summoned to 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 247 

deal with questions of policy more Intricate, with 
tasks of administration more grave than those 
which the voters of this country are now con- 
stantly required to act upon. From this tribunal 
of the populace there Is no appeal. If anyone 
thinks that the popular Intelligence is adequate 
to this emergency he ought to be very comfortable 
in his mind. If anyone Is In doubt about It he 
ought not to hold his peace. 

And yet, this is no time for jeremiads. He 
who interprets these words as the counsels of 
despair misses their meaning. They are the words 
of one who believes that this nation ought to 
live and that what ought to be may be. Yet 
with nations as with men there is no salvation 
for any who will not work It out for themselves — 
albeit with fear and trembling. The need of 
the hour as I see it is to arouse educated men 
and women to an apprehension of their responsi- 
bilities. The duty of the hour is to fill these 
forms of popular intelligence with their proper 
content. That duty rests upon the educated 
men and women of this country. From all our 
higher institutions of learning they are going 
forth, every year, in increasing numbers. Here 
is the strongest foundation of our hope. These 
young men and women, in all our colleges and 
higher schools are entering, with a keen and 



248 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

strenuous interest, Into the studies which relate 
to citizenship. The increase in the number pur- 
suing such studies, and In the enthusiasm with 
which they are pursued Is a notable feature of 
our recent educational life. Soon we shall have, 
scattered through all our communities, many 
thousands of men and women with the right to 
an opinion on the great aifairs of state, with the 
habit of scientific investigation which will deliver 
them from the snares of a reasonless partisanship, 
and with some fair equipment for safe and in- 
telligent leadership. Leaven enough is thus pre- 
paring to leaven the whole lump. 

But one thing is needful. The leaven must be 
mingled with the mass through and through, — 
thoroughly kneaded in. Every housewife knows 
what happens when the leaven is not mingled 
with the meal, but is suffered to lie by Itself In 
fermenting and putrefying aggregations. Not 
only does it fail of its function; it spoils the very 
substance it was meant to make nutritious. The 
condition of light and wholesome bread Is such 
a laborious kneading as shall distribute the leaven 
so that every particle of the flour shall be brought 
in contact with its quickening Influence. The 
kingdom of heaven Is like leaven which a woman 
took and hid in three measures of meal, until the 
whole was leavened. There Is something sig- 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 249 

nificant In that word "hid." The leaven only 
does its work well when it loses its own separate 
life, and merges itself in the substance with which 
it is mingled. 

Not otherwise is it with the culture which our 
colleges and universities provide. If it separate 
itself from the community, if it become exclusive 
and unsympathetic, if it serve to erect a barrier 
between those who have it and those who have 
it not, so that social classes are formed by it 
and we find the cultured and the uncultured 
set over against each other in indifferent or anti- 
pathetic relations, there we have the same kind 
of poisonous and destructive influence at work 
that we see in the unmingled leaven. There are 
few things more deadly in a democracy than 
learning for its own sake, or learning which feeds 
pride and kills sympathy and weakens the sense 
of public responsibility. And the culture which 
would serve and save must not be setting itself 
on high, and contrasting itself with the environ- 
ing ignorance; it must be content to humble it- 
self and share its light with the lowly, and pour 
the treasures of its grace and truth into the hearts 
of the poor. The work to be done by the edu- 
cated classes for their country is not chiefly the 
work of organizing societies and holding conven- 
tions, and forming clubs and writing papers, 



250 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

it is rather the work of putting themselves into 
personal, vital, helpful relations with their nearest 
neighbors, whose circumstances have been less 
favorable than their own and to whom by the 
contact of mind with mind, of life with life, they 
may be of the highest service. 

I have spoken of the fact that the counsel and 
leadership of educated men is apt to be spurned 
by those who most need it. There is more than 
one reason for this. The fault is chargeable, in 
part, upon the uneducated; for the conceit and 
arrogance of ignorance, or of that little learning 
which often replaces it, is apt to be colossal. But 
there is blame, also, with the educated people 
who have lost the power of leadership; whose 
culture has weakened the organic filaments that 
should bind them to their kind. No man is 
truly educated unless his sympathies have been 
broadened and deepened, and his sense of social 
responsibility has become quick and keen. The 
one thing needful is that the men and women who 
have had the advantages of the higher education 
should be able to put themselves into friendly 
and sympathetic relations with all the people 
round about them. Love is the only medium 
through which sweetness and light can be com- 
municated. 

In winning the leadership which belongs to 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 25 1 

culture one temptation must be shunned. In 
avoiding the Scylla of excluslveness, keep clear 
of the Charybdis of sycophancy. The flattery 
of rulers Is almost always a hideous crime. Rulers, 
especially If they be absolute, do not stand In 
need of flattery. It Is their weakness, rather than 
their strength, of which they most need to be 
reminded; It Is the tremendous responsibilities 
resting on them which ought always to be em- 
phasized. Rather bring home to the sovereign 
his shortcomings; point out to him the fatal 
blunders into which his conceit and pride of 
power have led him; show him that humility and 
docility are royal virtues. There have been 
courtiers and court preachers who have dared 
to do this, and above most men we honor them, 
while we despise the base creatures who always 
flatter the tyrant, and make him think that his 
crimes are virtues and his blunders inspirations. 
Now all this holds good whether we are dealing 
with a sovereign monarch or with the sovereign 
people. The flattery of a ruler, whether he be 
despot or demos, is an immeasurable wrong. We 
Americans have had much to say about lying 
courtiers, and flunkeys, and toad-eaters; but I 
fear that there Is no country in the world where 
the race of sycophants is more numerous or more 
cowardly than In this country. On the stump, 



252 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

on the platform, in the pulpit, in the sanc- 
tum we are all the while flattering our rulers; 
cultivating conceit in them more than a wise 
humility; assuring them that they know it all 
when indeed they greatly lack wisdom; humor- 
ing their errors instead of exposing them; con- 
firming their evil ways instead of reproving them. 
All this kind of work the demagogue will con- 
tinue to do; it is his trade; but the educated men 
and women of the land must have no part in it. 
It is for them to see life steadily, and see it whole, 
and tell no lies about it. It is for them to bear 
witness to the truth, whether it is popular or 
unpopular; to give no countenance to the fal- 
lacies and delusions of the crowd; to expose, with 
a quiet temper, but an unflinching logic, the 
sophistries of the demagogues. The work that 
could be done in any community, in enlightening, 
correcting, disinfecting, invigorating public opin- 
ion, by the educated men and women of that 
community, if they would courageously and 
judiciously put themselves into vital relations 
with their neighbors, is a work whose value passes 
computation. This is the way, it appears to me 
to be the only way of salvation. The popular 
intelligence must, in some way, be cleared and 
informed; I know not how it can be accomplished 
unless the educated men and women of this 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 253 

country who have no selfish ends to compass and 
know that they have none, shall give them- 
selves to the task with courage and consecration. 
I may be asked whether I am not overlooking 
the spiritual forces; whether the purification of 
the hearts of men and the enkindling of unselfish 
motives are not the primary concern. No; I am 
not overlooking nor undervaluing these forces; 
it is true that a new spirit and a new purpose 
are essential; and it Is especially true that all 
men need to learn that the service of the state is 
no less sacred, no less religious than the service 
of the church. But, after all, the pure motive 
will avail but little, in the great business of 
political administration, unless the directing in- 
telligence is sound and strong. An unselfish 
spirit, a Christian purpose, is an excellent thing 
in the captain of a ship, in the locomotive en- 
gineer, but it Is not enough. He must understand 
the mechanism entrusted to him, and know how 
to control it. How much less is mere benevolence 
of disposition an adequate equipment for the 
great responsibilities of governing a nation like 
this — responsibilities that rest on the voters of 
this country and nowhere else. There is no 
salvation for a democracy except in the trained 
intelligence and the disciplined judgment of the 
voters. And I know not how the voters of this 



254 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

land are to acquire this kind of intelligence un- 
less the men and women who possess it shall 
devote their lives to imparting It to those round 
about them who have it not. 

Would God that some such message as this 
might reach all the young men and women who 
are going forth in this month of June from the 
doors of our Colleges and Universities, and with 
them all the rest who have gone forth in other 
years, and have found or are seeking a place to 
stand somewhere on this broad continent! Would 
God that some sense of the responsibilities of 
culture in a Republic like ours might rest on all 
their souls! To them has been committed the 
power of saving this nation from anarchy and 
chaos. • God help them to discern their high 
calling! The discipline they have won, the 
knowledge they have gained, the outlook over 
the ages to which they have attained — these high 
possessions and prerogatives are not theirs to 
hoard and use for their own delectation. It is 
not to companionship with congenial minds; 
it is not to dilettante delights in things pleasant 
and graceful that they are called, but to that 
larger ministry which shall put their best gains 
at the service of those most needy. They are 
wanted In the churches, not merely as critical 
auditors once a Sunday, but as teachers in the 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 255 

mission schools, as visitors among the poor, as 
helpers In every labor of love. It Is not for what 
they can get for themselves out of this relation 
that they are called Into It; It is for what they 
can give In an association that puts them into 
direct contact with all sorts and conditions of 
men. There are no opportunities like these for 
those who have a mind to serve. They are 
wanted In the Charity Organization Societies 
and the Village Improvement Societies and the 
Home Culture Clubs; they are wanted in the 
Citizens' Leagues and the Civic Federations and 
the Good Government Clubs; they are wanted 
on the School Boards, in the City Councils, — 
they are wanted wherever there is a chance of 
co-operation with others, for the bringing in of 
the kingdom of good will. To this high summons 
they will not be recreant In this hour of the 
country's deepest need. For they must have 
heard, most men of discernment must be hearing, 
every day, the same august admonition that 
the poet heard at Concord Bridge: 

"From the deeps 
Where discrowned empires o'er their ruins brood, 
And many a thwarted hope wrings Its weak hands and 

weeps, 
I hear a voice as of a mighty wind 
From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined: 



2S6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS 

Beware, lest shifting with Time's gradual creep 
The light that guided shine into your eyes! 
The envious Powers of ill nor wink, nor sleep; 
Be therefore timely wise. 

Nor laugh when this one steals and that one lies, 
As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies, 
Till the deaf Fury comes, your house to sweep." 

Fellow citizens of the republic of letters, there 
is surely no need that you, who are familiar with 
the lessons of history, should be advised how 
much you ought to love this land of ours, nor 
what measure of devotion she deserves from those 
to whom her gifts have been so bountiful, — 

"She that lifts up the manhood of the poor, 

She of the open soul and open door, 

With room about her hearth for all mankind." 

The sky could hold for us no star of hope that 
looked down on her desolation; we could not 
live to behold her promise clouded and her sun 
going down at noon. Nor will we. It is ours 
to protect her from the foes that threaten her 
peace, to give our strength, our love, our life to 
serve her needs, to trim the torch of truth and 
hold it high aloft to light her path to peace and 
freedom. 

"Souls of her martyrs, draw near; 
Touch our dull lips with her fire. 



FORM AND SUBSTANCE 257 

That we may praise without fear 

Her, our delight, our desire, 

Our hope, our remembrance, our trust, 

Our present, our past, our to be, 

Who shall mingle her life with our dust 

And make us deserve to be free." 



Printed in the United States of America 



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'TpHE following pages contain advertisements of books 
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By S. PARKES CADMAN 

Cloth, 8vo. 

This book deals with three great Englishmen, great Chris- 
tians, great Churchmen, and loyal sons of Oxford, who, in 
Dr. Cadman's opinion, are the foremost leaders in religious 
life and activity that university has yet given to the world. 
"Many prophets, priests and kings," writes Dr. Cadman, 
"have been nourished within her borders, but none who in 
significance and contribution to the general welfare compare 
with Wycliffe, the real originator of European Protestantism; 
Wesley, the Anglican priest who became the founder of 
Methodism and one of the makers of modern England and of 
English speaking nations; Newman, the spiritual genius of 
his century, who reinterpreted Catholicism, both Anglican and 
Roman." 

Why Men Pray 

By CHARLES LEWIS SLATTERY 
Rector of Grace Church, New York City 

Cloth, T2mo, $.75 

Dr. Slattery defines prayer roughly as "talking with the 
unseen." In his book he does not argue about prayer but 
rather sets down in as many chapters six convictions which 
he has concerning it. These convictions are, first, that all men 
pray; second, that prayer discovers God, that, in other words, 
when men become conscious of their prayer they find them- 
selves standing face to face with one whom in a flash they 
recognize as God; third, prayer unites men; fourth, God de- 
pends on men's prayer; fifth, prayer submits to the best; and 
sixth, prayer receives God. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



NEW BOOKS ON RELIGION 

What Jesus Christ Thought of Himself 

By ANSON PHELPS STOKES 

Cloth, i2mo. 

The purpose of this book is to show in clear, compact form 
and in untechnical language what any intelligent student of 
the New Testament may find out for himself as to Jesus's view 
of his own person. A secondary purpose has been to interpret 
this self-revealed personality. The author divides his discus- 
sion into two main parts: The Human Side of Jesus Christ and 
The Divine Side of Jesus Christ. Under the former he takes 
up Christ's consciousness of his limitations, his consciousness 
that he was representing another and his consciousness of his 
subordination in prayer. Under the latter he considers Christ 
as Master of the Past, Master of the Present and Master of 
the Future. The book concludes with a chapter on the rec- 
onciliation of the human and the divine elements. 

The Centennial History of the American 
Bible Society 

By HENRY OTIS DWIGHT, LL.D. 
Recording Secretary of the Society 

In two volumes. Cloth, 8vo 

The American Bible Society was organized in May, 1816. 
Its work has been so interwoven with the development of the 
American republic that there will be felt a very general in- 
terest in this account of its one hundred years of existence. 
This has been prepared by the Recording Secretary who, for 
many months, has been engaged in gathering the necessary 
data and in writing the narrative. The volume will be found 
full of information not only as to the history of the society 
but also as to the results achieved in its distribution of the 
Scriptures throughout this country and in the far ends of the 
earth. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



